Jo Pierson is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. He is also Senior Researcher and staff member at the research centre iMinds-SMIT (Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication) since 1996, in charge of the research on privacy in social, mobile and ubiquitous media. Drawing upon science and technology studies and media-sociological approaches, his research and teaching focuses on datafication, privacy, surveillance, and user (dis)empowerment in internet and audio-visual media.