Research Projects

Call for PhD Applications at the University of Victoria:

One PhD stipend, funded through grants received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada  (SSHRC), and beginning in September 2012, is available in the Department of Political Science, University of Victoria to work under the supervision of Dr. Colin Bennett.  The student will be responsible for conducting research on the surveillance and privacy implications of new information and communications technologies, and especially online social networking.  The successful applicants will be involved with the SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) entitled the “New Transparency” and will have the opportunity to work with a number of scholars and students associated with this project in Canada and abroad, as well as those at the University of Victoria, including the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture (PACTAC).  Successful applicants will also be expected to be involved with the organization of workshops and conferences

Successful applicants will be paid a stipend of $15,000 annually for three years initially subject to satisfactory performance in the degree program.  Further funding will be available subject to successful grant applications. Additional opportunities for teaching and research assistantships are also available upon application.  Students may not receive stipends while holding a SSHRC doctoral or postdoctoral fellowship.

Applicants must apply for the PhD program in the Department of Political Science and indicate their scholarly interests in surveillance studies, broadly defined.  They should have, or be completing, an MA in Political Science, or a cognate discipline.  Further information can be found on the Department of Political Science website: http://web.uvic.ca/polisci/graduate/

The University deadline for full consideration for international students is 15 December 2011, and for Canadian students is 15 January 2012. Informal enquiries should be made to Colin Bennett (Email: cjb@uvic.ca), or the graduate secretary (poligrad@uvic.ca).

Social Networking and Privacy Protection

This is a new project funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council from 2010-2013.  The central hypothesis is that the evolution of a more “social web” is posing significant challenges to the theory of informational privacy as well as to the national and legal systems based on that theory. The main objective is to determine how the expectations of social networking websites and environments, whose raison d’etre is the facilitation of the sharing of personal information about users, can be reconciled with prevailing understandings about “reasonable expectations of privacy” and existing domestic and international regimes that are designed to protect personal data.  Organizations have to make decisions about the granularity and range of privacy choices to offer users. What determines an organization’s perspectives and policies on privacy protection?  What motivates them to grant users particular choices over how they might control the distribution of their personal information?

The project relies on a combination of methodologies at each stage of the project: key informant interviewing with the staff of data protection and privacy agencies, with Chief Privacy Officers, and with civil society privacy advocates; and content analysis of a sample of privacy statements and analysis of relevant policy reports, recommendations, rulings, court cases and other evidence of the policy record. The key issue is to understand the series of privacy choices presented to the user, and to establish a yardstick by which those choices may be compared across different websites and environments. A third methodology is based on auto-ethnographic techniques. Research assistants will be tasked with exploring and recording the personal and interactive experiences with registering privacy preferences online. The user perspective, carefully documented, can offer important insights into the interplay of regulatory, business and technological variables.  As the project progresses, I will be looking for graduate research assistants to assist with each of these methodologies.

The New Transparency Project

I am one of the co-investigators of the large international and multidisciplinary “New Transparency” project, coordinated through Queens University.

I have been involved in a number of aspects of this project.   Coordinated by Christopher Parsons, and also funded through the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, we have built a website entitled Deep Packet Inspection Canada.  Together with Kevin Haggerty, I organized a conference in Vancouver in advance of the Winter Olympics on surveillance at mega-events.  Some of the  papers delivered at this conference were  published in 2011 in a collection entitled Security Games:  Surveillance and Control at Mega-Events.  The project also supports the Security Games website. Together with Andrew Clement and Kate Milberry, I organized a workshop on “Cyber-Surveillance” in Toronto in May 2011.

Privacy Advocates and Advocacy

This project was funded from 2004 to 2007 by SSHRC and is substantially complete.  My book The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance was published in 2008, with a paperback edition in 2010.   The project aimed to profile the network of international privacy advocacy organizations, assess their strategies and tactics, and interrogate larger questions about the potential for social movement politics.  Our website on privacy advocates continues to document the civil society groups and actors who mobilize to challenge excessive surveillance in both online and offline environments.

The Politics of Identity Cards

A 2007 workshop on identity cards in comparative perspective yielded an edited volume entitled Playing the Identity Card:  Surveillance, Security and Identification in Global Perspective, co-edited with David Lyon.   My students and I continue to research the development of identity cards at a website devoted to identity cards.