Around the world, diverse approaches to governing digital society are evolving. From Brazil and California to the UK, Australia, the US, and China - each reflects different traditions, values, and visions. In Brussels, meanwhile, landmark legislation—ranging from the General Data Protection Regulation to new rules on digital services, markets, data, and artificial intelligence—has helped set global standards. Together, these efforts illustrate how different visions can compete, overlap, and converge—shaping both national strategies and international debates. 

2026 is a moment of reflection for CPDP. Marking the tenth anniversary of the GDPR, it invites stock-taking of its achievements and limitations, amid growing calls for “simplification” in the name of innovation and competitiveness. At the same time, the stakes extend far beyond legislation. They surface in questions of digital sovereignty, in trade disputes, and in the governance of infrastructures that structure everyday life. They are visible in the datafication of war as much as in the design of public services, and they affect how individuals experience rights, risks, and resilience in a digital society. 

These tensions provide the backdrop for CPDP 2026. True to its tradition, the conference will not seek to eliminate disagreement but to harness competing visions as a democratic strength for facing the future. CPDP’s global approach ensures it resonates within the Brussels ecosystem without being reduced to it: its international scope makes it a platform where law, policy, technology, markets, and civil society can engage across borders. Panels will be designed to surface diverse perspectives—not as obstacles to consensus, but as vital to shared understanding and democratic resilience, to create a space where expertise and experience from different fields can engage directly, critically, and constructively. 

CPDP ("Computers, Privacy and Data Protection") is a non-profit platform originally founded in 2007 by research groups from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Université de Namur and Tilburg University. The platform was joined in the following years by the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) and the Fraunhofer Institut für System und Innovationsforschung. CPDP has now grown into a platform carried by 20 academic centres of excellence from the EU, the US and beyond. As a world-leading multidisciplinary conference CPDP offers the cutting edge in legal, regulatory, academic and technological development in privacy and data protection. Within an atmosphere of independence and mutual respect, CPDP gathers academics, lawyers, practitioners, policy-makers, industry and civil society from all over the world in Brussels, offering them an arena to exchange ideas and discuss the latest emerging issues and trends. This unique multidisciplinary formula has served to make CPDP one of the leading data protection and privacy conferences in Europe and around the world.