Colin Bennett

Colin Bennett received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Wales, and his Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1986 he has taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, where he is now Professor. He has enjoyed Visiting Professorships at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Center for the Study of Law and Society at University of California, Berkeley, the School of Law, University of New South Wales, the Law, Science, Technology and Society Centre at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels and at the University of Toronto.

His research has focused on the comparative analysis of surveillance technologies and privacy protection policies at the domestic and international levels. In addition to numerous scholarly and newspaper articles, he has written or edited seven books, including The Governance of Privacy (MIT Press, 2006, with Charles Raab) and The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance (MIT Press, 2008), and policy reports on privacy protection for Canadian and international agencies. He was co-investigator of a large Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant entitled “The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting” which culminated in the report: Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada. Through a new SSHRC Partnership Grant on “Big Data Surveillance”, he is currently researching the capture and use of personal data by political parties in Western democracies.