She/Her
Cynthia Khoo is a technology and human rights lawyer and researcher who has spent the past decade working at the intersection of emerging technologies, the Internet, human rights, civil liberties, and anti-oppression. Her expertise focuses on how technological developments, such as social media or artificial intelligence, mediate and impact the equality, privacy, and free expression rights of historically marginalized groups. Over the years, her legal advocacy and research have spanned issues such as copyright law, intermediary liability, and online censorship; telecommunications law and net neutrality; and consumer privacy in the face of big data, to algorithmic policing; the use of stalkerware in intimate partner violence; and digital platform regulation to address technology-facilitated hate-based abuse.
Cynthia is currently a senior fellow at the Citizen Lab (Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto). From 2021 to 2024, she was a senior associate at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law in Washington, D.C., where she led the Center’s legal and policy advocacy, research, and coalition-building efforts on worker surveillance and automated management, and on algorithmic discrimination. She also co-coordinated the 2022 edition of the Center’s signature Color of Surveillance conference, about the monitoring and criminalization of abortion and reproductive justice, in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States.
Cynthia is called to the Ontario Bar and has been consulted by Canadian and U.S. government staff and regulators as a result of her work, in addition to appearing in print and broadcast media. She holds a J.D. from the University of Victoria and LL.M. (Concentration in Law and Technology) from the University of Ottawa, where she worked as junior counsel at and represented the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) as an intervener in cases before the Supreme Court of Canada.
