Colin Bennett received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Wales, and his Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Since 1986 he has taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, where he is now Professor. He has enjoyed Visiting Professorships at: Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; the Center for the Study of Law
and Society at University of California, Berkeley; the School of Law, University of New South Wales; the Law, Science, Technology and Society Centre at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels; and at Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.

His research has focused on the comparative analysis of surveillance technologies and privacy protection policies at the domestic and international
levels. In addition to numerous scholarly and newspaper articles, he has written or edited seven books, including The Governance of Privacy (MIT Press, 2006,
with Charles Raab); The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance (MIT Press, 2008); Playing the Identity Card: Surveillance, Security
and Identification in Global Perspective (Routledge, 2008 co-edited with David Lyon); and Security Games: Surveillance and Control at Mega-Events
(Routledge, 2011, co-edited with Kevin Haggerty).

He has completed policy reports on privacy and data protection for the Canadian
government, the Canadian Standards Association, the Privacy Commissioner of
Canada, the European Commission, the UK Information Commissioner and
others. He was co-investigator of a large Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant entitled “The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting” which culminated in the 2016 report: Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada. Through a SSHRC Partnership Grant on “Big Data Surveillance”, and a new SSHRC Insight Grant, he is currently researching the comparative politics of data-driven elections, and the capture and use of personal information by political parties and candidates in Western democracies.