Bio

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. 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 a Visiting Scholar at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. 

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 published five 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, with Rebecca Grant); The Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments in the Digital Age (The MIT Press, 2006 with Charles Raab);  The Privacy Advocates (MIT Press 2009); and Playing the Identity Card (Routledge 2009, with David Lyon). He has also completed policy reports on privacy protection for the Canadian government, the Canadian Standards Association, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the European Commission, and the UK Information Commissioner. He is currently completing a book on the privacy and surveillance implications of mega-events such as the Olympic Games.  He is also the co-investigator of a SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant entitled “The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting.”

He teaches a range of courses on US politics, political analysis and information and communications policy.  

See:  www.colinbennett.ca for more information. 

Courses