Photo Credit: Kathy Pham

Jon 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 also a long time Faculty Associate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy; and a Research Associate of the Citizens and Technology (CAT) Lab based at Cornell University’s Department of Communications.

Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Jon has studied law at Columbia Law School as a Fulbright Scholar and at Oxford as a Mackenzie King Travelling Scholar. He holds a doctorate in “Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences” from the interdisciplinary Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford (Balliol College). In recent years, he has also spent time as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media; as a Senior Research Fellow on the Technology and Social Change Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy; and as a Research Affiliate of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Jon’s research and teaching 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 and press coverage, including the Washington Post, Reuters International, New York Times, Newsweek, TIME Magazine, NBC News, Forbes, Psychology Today, Le Monde, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Freitag, Il Fatto Quotidiano, The Times of India, Indian Express, Jerusalem Post, Russia Today, Huffington Post, Politico, Slate, Motherboard, The Hill, The Index on Censorship, and has been chronicled in WIRED and profiled in Harvard Magazine. In 2020, his work on the privacy chilling effects of online surveillance won the Reidenberg—Kerr Paper Award at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference at UC Berkeley Law and, more recently, his work on the legal risks of adversarial attacks on generative AI systems won the Spotlight Paper Award at the Generative AI and the Law (GenLaw ’24) Workshop held at the 2024 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML, 2024) held in Vienna, Austria.

Beyond research and teaching, Jon serves on Advisory Boards for the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), a non-profit whose mission is to combat online abuse that threatens civil rights and civil liberties, and the Law Commission of Ontario’s AI and Administrative Decision-Making Project.  He also serves on the Steering Committee for the Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) workshop co-located at the annual USENIX Security Symposium; the Steering Committee for the annual Canadian Technology Law Scholars Conference; and was recently a  member of the Program Committee for the Workshop on Generative AI and Law (GenLaw) that coincides with the annual International Conference on Machine Learning.

For a higher resolution image, click here.

---