Maria Paz Canales

Head of Legal, Policy and Research

Maria Paz oversees the development of insight and expertise to support GPD’s team and projects. Her particular focus areas are data protection, artificial intelligence, freedom of expression, competition and intellectual property. 

Previously, she co-founded and served as Executive Director at Derechos Digitales. She holds a Master’s Degree with specialisation in Law and Technology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Explore their work

05 Dec 2023
Blog post

The final text of UNESCO’s Guidelines: a more balanced approach to platform governance

The final text of UNESCO’s Guidelines for the governance of digital platforms was released this month. The document marks the conclusion of a process started in September 2022 by UNESCO to produce what were originally billed as ‘Guidelines for regulating…
31 Oct 2023
Blog post

Navigating the Global AI Governance Landscape 

The recent Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Kyoto reaffirmed AI as an urgent cross-cutting priority for a diverse set of stakeholders. At the same time, it highlighted the rapidly expanding scale and complexity of the AI governance landscape.  This complexity presents a…
19 Sep 2023
Blog post

What would a human rights-based approach to AI governance look like?

Over the past year, discussions around artificial intelligence (AI) have saturated media and policy environments. Perspectives on it vary widely: from boosterist narratives which posit the limitless potential of AI-powered technologies to help overcome social inequalities and accelerate industrial development; to apocalyptic framings, which suggest that a (speculative)…