Biography
Alvaro Bedoya was sworn in May 16, 2022 as a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission.
Commissioner Bedoya is especially interested in how the FTC can help people living paycheck to paycheck. He spends as much time as he can meeting with small business owners, working people, and community leaders in rural and urban America.
Before his confirmation, Commissioner Bedoya founded the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law and also helped establish the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy as its first chief counsel. In these roles, he helped pass laws to stop the abuse of face surveillance technology and the unrestricted sharing of people’s information with national security and law enforcement agencies. Much of his work on privacy focuses on its importance to unpopular religious and ethnic minorities. His essay on the subject, “Privacy as Civil Right,” is featured in textbooks used in U.S. law schools.
A naturalized citizen born in Peru, Bedoya co-founded the Esperanza Education Fund, the first status-blind college scholarship for immigrant students in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, and worked as a field researcher for the International Labor Organization’s Special Action Program to Combat Forced Labor, where he wrote exposés on debt bondage and other forms of forced labor in South America. He practiced law at Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale & Dorr, and served on the non-profit boards of the Hispanic Bar Association of the District of Columbia and CASA.
Bedoya graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served on the Yale Law Journal and received the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. He lives in Rockville, Maryland with his wife, Dr. Sima Bedoya of Louisiana, a pediatric psychologist.
