Maria Paz Canales

Maria Paz Canales is a Chilean lawyer and holds a Master’s Degree with specialization in Law and Technology from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently she is the Head of Legal, Policy and Research at Global Partners Digital (GPD), a civil society organisation that works globally to ensure that human rights underpin the development, use and governance of digital technologies. Through advocacy, partnerships, capacity building, networks, and research, GPD shapes rights-respecting laws and policies and helps build a more diverse digital policy ecosystem. Between 2017-2021 she served as the Executive Director of Derechos Digitales, a 19 years old independent non-profit organization based in Chile, working across Latin America on human rights in the digital environment, particularly freedom of expression, privacy, and access to knowledge and information.

She was part of the group who founded the organization in 2005. She was also part of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) (2019-2021) and the programing committee of Latin America and Caribe IGF (2017-2022). Previously, her work in private practice and academia covered telecommunications regulation, competition, data protection and intellectual property.