Jon is a legal scholar and social scientist who joined the Faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School in July 2020. He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society ; a 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 Lab (CATLab) based at Cornell University’s Department of Communications
A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, he has studied law at Columbia Law School as a Fulbright Scholar and at Oxford University as a Mackenzie King Scholar. He holds a doctorate in “Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences” from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford (Balliol College, 2016). Before joining Osgoode, he taught law at Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University and spent time as a Research Associate at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. More recently, he was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media.
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 in this context has been published in top law reviews and leading international conferences on AI and machine learning (e.g., ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS) and has received national and international attention, including coverage in the Washington Post, Reuters International, New York Times, Newsweek, TIME Magazine, NBC News, and WIRED among others, and has been chronicled by Harvard Magazine. For instance, his research on the privacy chilling effects of online surveillance won the Reidenberg—Kerr Paper Award at the 2020 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 and the Steering Committee for the Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) workshop, which is co-located at the annual USENIX Security Symposium. He was also recently invited to join the Program Committee for the Workshop on Generative AI and Law (GenLaw) that coincides with the annual International Conference on Machine Learning.
Follow him on Twitter here.
Research Interests: Technology Law, Privacy/Surveillance, Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Human Rights, Online Abuse/Harassment, Disinformation/Manipulation, Empirical/Computational Legal Studies, Private Law.
Graduate Research Supervision (LLM): Technology Law, Privacy/Surveillance, Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Human Rights, Online Abuse/Harassment, Disinformation/Manipulation, Empirical/Computational Legal Studies, Private Law.
Professor Penney welcomes the opportunity to supervise graduate work in his principal fields of research (noted above).