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 the author of Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and is a long time Faculty Associate of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society; Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy; and Research Associate of the Citizens and Technology (CAT) Lab based at Cornell University. In recent years, he has also spent time as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media; as a Visiting Research Fellow 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 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 been published in leading law reviews and international conferences and has received national and international attention, 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. 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).
