Effective Transparency and User Controls: Are We Close to a Breakthrough?

  • Panel
  • Le Baixu
  • Wednesday 21.05 — 10:30 - 11:45

Organising Institution

Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft (HIIG)

Germany

  • Academic 2
  • Business 2
  • Policy 2
The risks of personalised advertising and the problem of ineffective consent in practice have long been recognised by regulators, studied by scientists and fought by privacy activists. With the Fitness Check of EU consumer law on digital fairness, a ban on personalised advertising is being discussed again. However, is a ban necessary to effectively contain the risks, or can consent agents fulfil this function just as effectively while better reflecting the different privacy attitudes of EU citizens? Which solutions are currently available? What methods can be used to empirically test their effectiveness and what are the latest results of such studies? What implications do these solutions have for the online advertising market? And what legal measures are still needed? The panel will provide an overview of current developments, the current state of research and possible practical and legislative development paths.

Questions to be answered

  1. Do we need a ban on personalised online advertising?
  2. Or can the risks of personalised online advertising for consumers and society as a whole be sufficiently controlled by a common visual control interface for consumers and advertising services?
  3. How can the risks of personalised online advertising be empirically measured and only on this empirical basis effectively controlled?
  4. How would the actors involved have to coordinate for a common visual control interface and what would have to be regulated by law for this to happen?

Moderator

Anja Wyrobek

European Parliament - Europe

Anja Wyrobek is a Brussels based legal professional known for her extensive expertise in European law, policymaking, and emerging technologies, particularly in artificial intelligence, digitalisation and data protection. As Parliamentary Advisor to the S&D LIBE Coordinator she oversees legislation related to internal security and notably digital fundamental rights, surveillance, and artificial intelligence in the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. Her work reflects a commitment to ensuring that technological advancements align with European values and legal standards.

Speaker

Christina Michelakaki

OECD - International

Christina Michelakaki is a Policy Analyst at the Data Flows, Governance and Privacy Division of the OECD in Paris. She has a legal background and holds an LL.M on Information Technology, Media & Communications Law from the London School of Economics (LSE) (2022, London). She is also an EU qualified lawyer. Before joining the OECD, Christina was a Policy Counsel for Global Privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF). She followed global and European trends in data protection and privacy laws, focused on children’s privacy, health data governance and AI regulations, and conducted extensive research on Data Protection by Design and by Default.

Speaker

Felix Mikolasch

noyb - Austria

Felix Mikolasch is a data protection lawyer at noyb - European Center for Digital Rights, a Vienna-based not-for-profit association focused on strategic GDPR enforcement. Together with the Sustainable Computing Lab at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, NOYB started ADPC (Advanced Data Protection Control). ADPC is a technical specification that describes how signals for automated communication of users data protection decisions can be sent from the terminal of a user (usually the browser) to a website. It aims to demonstrate that a more reasonable approach to communicate privacy preferences than typical “cookie banners” is possible.

Speaker

Max von Grafenstein

Humboldt Institut for Internet and Society / Law & Innovation - Germany

Prof Dr Max von Grafenstein, LL.M. heads the research programme Governance of Data-Driven Innovation at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. Since 2018, he has held the professorship of Digital Self-Determination at the Einstein Center Digital Future (Berlin University of the Arts). He is also a practising lawyer and founder of the academic spin-off Law & Innovation, in which his interdisciplinary team developed a fully functional consent agent based on ADPC and used it to empirically research the effects of different consent designs on informedness, appropriateness and consent rates (www.consenter.eu). Max is an academic member of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27/WG 5 (Identity management and privacy technologies).

Speaker

Malte Beyer-Katzenberger

European Commission - Europe

Malte Beyer-Katzenberger is policy developer and team leader in the European Commission, DG CONNECT. He has recently worked on the 2020 EU data strategy, the Data Governance Act and the Data Act. He is currently involved in the elaboration of the 2025 EU Data Union strategy and the reform of the ePrivacy rules.