Pam Dixon

Pam Dixon is the founder and executive director of the World Privacy Forum. An author and researcher, she has written respected and influential studies in the area of data protection, identity, and privacy; Dixon conducted substantive biometrics research in India, which formed the basis of a scholarly article analyzing India’s Aadhaar, biometrics, and EU-US data protection policy (Springer-Nature, 2017). She was the lead author on a groundbreaking report on predictive analytics and financial, medical, and other scoring mechanisms, The Scoring of America (April 2014). She researched and wrote the first report on medical identity theft (May 2006), identifying and bringing that topic to the public for the first time. In 2008, an influential California law to require medical data breach notification was passed based on Dixon’s research. Her most recent work in this area was published in 2018, and focused on the geographic and methodological patterns of medical identity uses. Dixon has written numerous other privacy studies, including studies in the area of health, financial, online, biometrics, genetic privacy, and workplace privacy. She is an expert advisor to OECD on AI, and has been an OECD advisor on health data uses. Dixon was formerly a research fellow with the Privacy Foundation at Denver University’s Sturm School of Law where she researched and wrote about technology-related privacy issues. Dixon has testified before the US Congress and Federal agencies, and is frequently quoted in the media regarding privacy and security issues. She serves on the editorial board of the Harvard- based Journal of Technology Science. She is the author of 8 books, including Online Privacy with Robert Gellman. She was the editor of Surveillance in America, An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, and the Law (2016). Her next book on privacy is forthcoming in 2019.