Alvaro Bedoya
Published November 29, 2017
Updated April 17, 2021

Alvaro Bedoya is the founding director of the Center on Privacy and Technology and a visiting professor at Georgetown Law. He is an expert on digital privacy issues, and his research focuses on how commercial data collection and government surveillance affects people of color and immigrants.

In 2016, he co-authored The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America, a year-long investigation that revealed that most American adults are enrolled in a police face recognition network. He is the creator of the Immigrant Surveillance Working Group, a coalition of digital and immigrant rights organizations.

Prior to joining the Center, Alvaro served as chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, and to then-chairman Al Franken. In this capacity, he was the staff negotiator for significant portions of both the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 and the USA FREEDOM Act, a bipartisan surveillance reform bill.

Expertise: Digital and Internet privacy, surveillance of people of color, immigrants, and other historically marginalized people, face recognition, commercial data collection

Location: Washington, D.C.

Email: amb420@georgetown.edu

Phone: (202) 662-9779

Twitter: @alvarombedoya

As Heard On NPR Weekend Edition Sunday: Police Facial Recognition Databases Log About Half Of Americans


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