Jon is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School; 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 a Research Affiliate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is also a long time Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
Originally from Halifax, Canada, 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, 2016).
During his studies at Oxford, Jon was a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow and Canadian Centennial Scholar at Balliol College and spent a summer as a Google Policy Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, where he worked on an Open Net Initiative transparency project to encourage corporate transparency about government and law enforcement data requests. He was also Project Coordinator for the Privacy Value Networks Project, a large scale, multi-university, multi-million dollar Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) (UK) funded research project focused on understanding data privacy, and building tools and systems to promote it, through systematic empirical research involving law, regulation, and behavioral science at the Oxford Internet Institute.
Jon’s research lies at the intersection of law, technology, and human rights, with strong empirical, interdisciplinary, and social science dimensions. From established technologies like the internet to emerging ones like artificial intelligence and automation, his work aims to understand technology’s role in public and private sector sector censorship, surveillance, content moderation, legal enforcement, online abuse, disinformation, and other social/corporate/regulatory practices, and their implications for human rights. His doctoral thesis, for example, explored who social, corporate, and regulatory activities contribute to chilling effects online through a series of empirical legal case studies like how online surveillance impacts or “chills” people activities online.
Jon’s work 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, as well as coverage by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept.
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