Dr. Colin Bennett

About Dr. Bennett

Colin Bennett received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Wales, and his PhD 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. From 1999-2000, he was a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In 2007 he was a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, he was visiting professor at the School of Law, University of New South Wales. In 2013, he was a visiting professor with the Law, Science, Technology and Society Centre at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels.

His research has focused on the social implications of new information technologies, and on the development and implementation of privacy protection policies at the domestic and international levels.

In addition to numerous scholarly and newspaper articles, he has authored or edited six books: Regulating Privacy: Data Protection and Public Policy in Europe and the United States (Cornell University Press, 1992); Visions of Privacy: Policy Choices for the Digital Age (University of Toronto Press, 1999, co-edited with Rebecca Grant); The Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments in the Digital Age (The MIT Press, 2006, co-authored with Charles Raab); The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance (The MIT Press, 2008); Playing the Identity Card: Surveillance, Security and Identification in Global Perspective (Routledge, 2008 co-edited with David Lyon); and Security Games: Surveillance and Control at Mega-Events (Routledge, 2011, co-edited with Kevin Haggerty).

He has completed policy reports on privacy and data protection for the Canadian government, the Canadian Standards Association, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the European Commission, the UK Information Commissioner and others.

He is currently the co-investigator of a large Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant entitled, "The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting." He is also currently working on a comparative research project on the use of personal data by political parties and election campaigns.