Pam Dixon
Founder and Executive Director
World Privacy Forum
Pam Dixon is the founder and executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a respected public interest research group. An author and researcher, she has written influential studies in the area of identity, AI, health, and complex data ecosystems and their governance for more than 20 years. Dixon has worked extensively on privacy across multiple jurisdictions, including the US, India, Africa, Asia, the EU, and additional jurisdictions. Dixon currently serves as the co-chair of the UN Statistics Data Governance and Legal Frameworks working group, and is co-chair of WHO’s Research, Academic, and Technical network. At OECD, Dixon leads the formal civil society multistakeholder work in OECD’s new AI Working Party. In prior work, Dixon was part of the AI expert group that crafted the OECD AI Principles, which were ratified in 2018. (https://www.oecd.org/going-digital/ai/principles/ ) Dixon has presented her work on complex data ecosystems governance to the National Academies of Science and to the Royal Academies of Science. She has written 9 books and numerous studies and articles. Dixon is the 2021 recipient of the EFF Pioneer Award for groundbreaking research regarding privacy and data ecosystems.
Dixon was named one of the most influential global experts in digital identity in 2021. Dixon conducted substantive biometrics research in India from 2010 to 2014, which formed the basis of a scholarly, peer-reviewed article of original research regarding India’s Aadhaar biometric identity system and its policies (Pam Dixon, A Failure to Do No Harm: India’s Aadhaar biometric ID program and its inability to protect privacy in relation to measures in Europe and the U.S., Springer Nature, Health Technology. DOI 10.1007/s12553-017-0202-6. http://rdcu.be/tsWv ). Dixon’s work from A Failure to Do No Harm was cited twice in the landmark 2018 Supreme Court of India Aadhaar decision. The Supreme Court required the Aadhaar system to be both curtailed and improved in meaningful ways.
In 2019, Dixon served as Rapporteur for the first Roundtable of African Data Protection Authorities (RADPA), held at ID4Africa, for which she produced a rapporteur’s report regarding privacy and identity systems governance in African jurisdictions. (English version; French version)
