Mariana Canto is a PhD Candidate at the University of Stirling where she is part of the interdisciplinary cluster on Democracy, Human Rights and Communication/Advocacy in the Digital Age and is supervised by Dr. Damian Etone, Dr. Professor William Webster, Professor Rowan Cruft, and Dr Edit Freyo. She investigates how the recent increase in scrutiny regarding legal mechanisms to control the export and misuse of dual-use technologies used for cybersurveillance purposes - such as commercial spyware - around the world might impact the British regulatory landscape.   

Previously, Mariana was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's German Chancellor Fellow and member of the Politics of Digitalization Unit (POLDI) at WZB Berlin Social Science Center (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung), Germany. She is also the Director of the Law and Technology Research Institute of Recife (IP.rec), Brazil, having completed her LLB at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil (2018) followed by an MSc in Science and Technology in Society (2021), from the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh (Chevening Scholarship recipient). In her thesis, she investigated oversight mechanisms for emerging technologies used by Police Scotland. Mariana's main scientific interests are related to surveillance studies, data-driven technologies, and power asymmetries.