On the Identity Trail - Valerie Steeves: bio

Valerie Steeves is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada. Her main area of research is human rights and technology issues.

Professor Steeves has written and spoken extensively on privacy from a human rights perspective, and is an active participant in the privacy policy making process in Canada. In 1997, as a Special Advisor to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Rights, she organized and facilitated a series of public consultations exploring the meaning of privacy as a human right, and was one of the principal drafters of the Committee's report, Where Do we Draw the Line? She has appeared as an expert witness before a number of Parliamentary Committees regarding privacy legislation, and was a Special Advisor to Senator Finestone with respect to the Privacy Rights Charter. She is currently a member of the Canadian Standards Association's Technical Committee on Privacy and the Chair of the National Privacy Coalition.

Professor Steeves is the author of a number of award-winning educational games designed to teach children how to protect their human rights in cyberspace. Her multi-media game Sense and NonSense won the Canadian Race Relations Foundation's Award of Excellence in Race Relations Education and her interactive cyberplay about online privacy is used by Girl Guides across the country in the You Go Girl in Technology badge program.

In 2004, Professor Steeves she was awarded the Labelle Lectureship at McMaster University. The Labelle is a juried prize that recognizes scholars engaged in multi-disciplinary research who are challenging existing methods or accepted ideas.

“Operational Security Standard: Management of Information Technology Security from a Privacy Perspective” (Keynote address), National Information System Security Officers Conference, Directorate of Information Management and Security, Department of National Defence, Cornwall, May 2006.

“Popular Culture and Surveillance: Understanding Representations of Surveillance on Film” presented at Crime, Justice and Surveillance Conference, Centre for Criminological Research, Sheffield University, U.K., April 2006.

“Security, Everyday Practices and Representations in Popular Culture” presented at Privacy and Networks Workshop, Ecole normale supérieure, Paris, France, April 3, 2006.

“Borders, Risk and the New Conformity” presented at Risk, Threat, and the New Normal: An Interdisciplinary Conference on National Security, National Security Working Group, University of Ottawa, March 2006.

“Privacy and Security: The Case for Privacy as a Human Right”(Keynote address), Canadian Access and Privacy Association, Ottawa, November, 2005.

“Security, Data Protection and Human Rights” (Keynote address), Department of Fisheries and Oceans Access to Information and Privacy Conference, Cornwall, October 2005.

“Tensions Between Human Rights and Data Protection Conceptions of Privacy”, presented at the World Summit of the Information Society Thematic Meeting on Cybersecurity, Geneva, Switzerland, July 2005.