Jon Penney is a legal academic and social scientist. He is presently a Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab located at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, a Research Affiliate of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, and teaches law as an Assistant Professor at Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University in Canada. As of January 2018, he is also a Research Associate of the Civil Servant Project based at the MIT Media Lab, which pursues citizen science towards a safer and fairer internet, and from 2012 to 2015, Jon was a Fellow and then Research Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Jon studied law at Columbia Law School as a Fulbright Scholar and at Oxford as a Mackenzie King Scholar and holds a doctorate in information/communication sciences from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.

Jon’s research lies at the intersection of law, technology, and social science, with an emphasis on privacy, censorship, surveillance, and automated/AI legal processess. His doctoral work at Oxford on chilling effects associated with online surveillance and other personal and regulatory online threats, for example, received international attention, including coverage in the Washington Post, Reuters International, New York Times, Newsweek, TIME Magazine, Le Monde, and The Guardian, among others, as well as coverage by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept.