Reclaiming Personhood in the Age of Disruption

  • Panel
  • Le Baixu
  • Friday 23.05 — 10:30 - 11:45

Organising Institution

Brussels Privacy Hub

Belgium

  • Academic 2
  • Business 1
  • Policy 3
In a world increasingly shaped by data-driven and AI-mediated practices, the preservation of individual dignity and civic well-being takes a backseat to algorithmic efficiency and commercial interest. This panel will examine the complex challenges of embedding and enforcing fundamental protections—by design and by default—within online service architectures that impact billions daily. From Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA) to pervasive personalisation and algorithmic sorting and scoring systems, there is an urgent need to clarify boundaries and explore alternative service designs to ensure technology serves the people behind the screens, not the other way around. In recent case law, the CJEU appears to draw inspiration from service design principles that advocate for the separation of two layers—primary services and personalized services— to better preserve individual autonomy and agency. This panel will examine what further steps are needed to make service design truly human-centric.

Questions to be answered

  1. What else is needed to outlaw online behavioural advertising (OBA)?
  2. How far are we from making non-personalisation the default setting across platforms?
  3. How to balance the right to data protection and economic efficiency?
  4. Is the principle of necessity the new black in the data protection space?

Moderator

Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon

Brussels Privacy Hub - Belgium

Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon is co-Director of the Brussels Privacy Hub. She is also a visiting professor at the University of Southampton Law School of law, where she held the chair in IT law and Data Governance until 2022. She was Principal Legal Engineer at Immuta Research for six years. Sophie is the author and co-author of several legal articles, chapters and books on data protection and privacy. She has been Editor-in-chief of the Computer Law and Security Review, a leading international journal of technology law, for almost a decade and is now Honorary Editor. She has also served as a legal and data privacy expert for the European Commission, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for the Cooperation and Security in Europe, and for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Speaker

Romain Robert

EDPS - Europe

Romain is a legal advisor in the Policy and Consultation Unit of the EDPS. He began his career as a Belgian qualified lawyer specializing in ICT law. He then worked successively for the Belgian Data Protection Authority, the European Data Protection Supervisor, and the European Data Protection Board. He was also a program director at noyb and a member of the litigation chamber of the Belgian Data Protection Authority from 2019 to 2025.

Speaker

Lex Zard

Leiden University - Netherlands

Dr. Aleksandre Zardiashvili (alias Lex Zard) is an independent researcher focusing on the governance of digital advertising. Lex received his PhD in May 2024 titled: “Power & Dignity: The Ends of Online Behavioural advertising in the European Union” in Leiden University (the Netherlands), where he also worked as a researcher and a lecturer in 2019-2023. Lex is currently working on several projects related to digital advertising, including the European Union (EU) Commission study “Online Advertising at the Crossroads of the Different Regulatory Frameworks”. Lex is also a Technology & Human Rights Fellow at Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where he works with other fellows on the theme of “Surveillance Capitalism vs Democracy”. In this context, Lex mainly investigates the theories of harm to understand the societal costs of surveillance-based advertising. As a Balsillie Scholar, Lex examines the governance frameworks necessary to ensure fair balancing of interests within browser-based online advertising solutions currently being developed as the alternative to traditional advertising models allowing cross-site surveillance.

Speaker

Margaux Schaeffer

CNIL - France

Legal counsel, Digital Economy and Financial Services Department, Directorate for Legal Support, CNIL, France

Speaker

Luca Nannini

Privacy Network - Italy

Luca works with AI standards and policies. He holds a PhD in explainable artificial intelligence (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela). His educational background ranges from linguistics and cognitive science to IT product management.