Jon Penney
Senior Research Fellow
Jon Penney is a Senior Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab. He is a legal scholar and social scientist based at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, in Toronto, where he is an Associate Professor and holds the York Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence, Data Governance, and the Law. He is a longtime Faculty Associate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and Research Associate of the Citizens and Technology (CAT) Lab based at Cornell University.
Jon’s expertise lies at the intersection of law, technology, and human rights, with an emphasis on emerging technologies like AI, machine learning, and automation, as well as interdisciplinary and empirical methods. His research often explores the privacy, security, and safety dimensions of these technologies and their implications for law, policy, and human rights. His award winning research has received national and international attention, including coverage in the Washington Post, Reuters International, New York Times, NBC News, CBC News, Time Magazine, Le Monde, and The Guardian among other outlets, and has been chronicled in both WIRED and Harvard Magazine.
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Publications
Submission to the Government of Canada on the Renewal of the Responsible Business Conduct Strategy
This submission outlines Canadian technology companies and the threat they pose to human rights abroad, as well as suggests mechanisms the Government of Canada’s RBC strategy can adopt to address the harmful impacts of Canadian-made technology.
The Dangerous Effects of Unregulated Commercial Spyware
In recent days, United Nations Special Rapporteurs have released two revelatory reports that demonstrate the dangerous effects of unchecked technology in the hands of autocrats: one relating to the proliferation and abuse of surveillance software and one that investigates the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Both reports highlight the danger of unaccountable and unregulated surveillance technology sold to countries with egregious human rights records.
Planet Netsweeper
Executive Summary
This report describes our investigation into the global proliferation of Internet filtering systems manufactured by the Canadian company, Netsweeper Inc. After undertaking a mapping of worldwide country installations, we focus in on ten country cases in which we verify that Netsweeper systems are being used to censor the Internet for subscribers of consumer Internet Service Providers, and where human rights and corporate social responsibility questions are acute.
