Professor Ignacio Cofone
Professor of Law and Regulation of AI, Institute for Ethics in AI and Faculty of Law
About
Professor Ignacio Cofone’s research focuses on how law and regulation should respond to AI-driven social and economic changes. His book, The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy, argues that AI systems expose the limits of privacy and data protection frameworks built around individual consent and control, and that these areas of law must instead be re-oriented around duties that we owe one another as members of a society and relationships of power. His current work examines non-material harms caused by AI (such as discrimination, manipulation and loss of autonomy) and how regulation can support human-centred AI innovation.
He is Professor of Law and Regulation of AI at the Oxford Faculty of Law and the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI. He is also a Fellow of Reuben College, Oxford and is affiliated to the Yale Law School Information Society Project and the Quebec AI Institute. Before joining Oxford, he held the Canada Research Chair in AI Law and Data Governance at McGill University. He holds common law and civil law degrees, a JSD from Yale Law School and a joint PhD (rerum politicarum) from Hamburg University and Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has advised governments, courts and other public and private institutions on adapting law and regulation to AI.
Image credit: Ian Wallman
Expertise
- Regulation of artificial intelligence
- Data protection and privacy
- Artificial intelligence policy
- Ethics of emerging technologies
- Digital rights and online harms
- Automated decision-making
- Bias, discrimination and fairness in AI systems
- AI transparency and accountability
Recent media work
- Don’t hate ChatGPT-5. Your chatbot is not your friend (The Global Mail, 2025)
- Harm and Power in the Information Economy ((Fifteen Eighty Four, Cambridge University Press, 2024)
- Why I encourage my students to use ChatGPT (The Globe and Mail, 2024)
- Meta charging European users to remove ads is a privacy red herring (The Conversation, 2023)
- The 23andMe data breach reveals the vulnerabilities of our interconnected data (The Conversation, 2023)
- Le gouvernement québécois pourrait manquer son coup (La Presse, 2023)