Is Palantir governing your workplace? intermediaries, lock-in and data infrastructures

  • Panel
  • Class Room
  • Friday 22.05 — 14:15 - 15:30
  • Academic 4
  • Policy 2
Controversies surrounding Palantir Technologies, including its role in the NHS Federated Data Platform, illustrate how a small number of vendors can mediate workplace surveillance, , creating technical and contractual lock-in and increasingly embedded in data infrastructures that connect employment data with health, insurance, finance and public services. In these configurations, employers and intermediaries can derive insights that extend beyond productivity or location, including behavioural, biometric, health-related and emotion-linked inferences. The panel examines which legal, institutional and collective tools are needed to contest these infrastructures, how power imbalances between employers, intermediaries and workers can be reduced. It asks whether EU frameworks, notably GDPR, the AI Act, and competition regulation, can address cross-domain profiling and infrastructural power, and what role regulators can play.

Questions to be answered

  1. • What enforcement tools and institutional coordination are required across DPAs, market surveillance authorities and competition authorities to address lock-in and cross-context profiling?
  2. • Where do GDPR and the AI Act reveal structural limits when data processing is mediated through intermediaries and vendor ecosystems?
  3. • What governance mechanisms can prevent procurement contracts from becoming de facto surveillance mandates?
  4. • What scope do collective bargaining and worker representation have to intervene in data infrastructures that extend beyond the workplace?

Moderator

Aida Ponce Del Castillo

ETUI - Belgium

Aída is a lawyer by training. She holds a master’s degree in bioethics and has obtained her European doctorate in law. At the Foresight Unit of the ETUI, her research focuses on the cross-boundary field between science and emerging technologies, especially with regard to ethical, social and legal issues, with a focus on AI. Additionally, she is in charge of conducting foresight projects. She is a member of the committee for the National Convergence Plan for the Development of AI, in Belgium. At the OECD she is a member of the working parties on biotechnology, nanotechnology and converging technologies, as well as on Al governance. She was previously Head of the ETUI Health and Safety Unit and coordinator of the Workers’ Interest Group at the Advisory Committee of Safety and Health to the European Commission.

Speaker

Dimitra Kotouza

Researcher at Labour Research Department - International

Dimitra Kotouza is a researcher and data analyst at the Labour Research Department (LRD) in London. She holds a PhD in Politics and Government from the University of Kent, alongside postgraduate training in researching work from London Metropolitan University, and degrees in sociology and social psychology from the University of Essex and the University of Sussex. Prior to joining LRD, she was a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (2021–2024). Her work combines empirical research and data analysis on labour, work and industrial relations, with a particular focus on workers’ experiences and labour market dynamics.

Speaker

Oliver Marsh

AlgorithmWatch - Germany

As Head of Tech Research, Oliver leads AlgorithmWatch's research work and partnerships on policy areas including the Digital Services Act and the AI Act. Oliver previously worked on platform and data governance as an official in Downing Street in the UK, and as an analyst of online harms for CASM Technology, The Institute for Strategic Dialogue and Demos. He holds a PhD in sociology of social media from University College London and a degree in Natural Sciences & History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University.

Speaker

Irmak Erdogan

KU Leuven - Belgium

Irmak Erdoğan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for IT & IP Law, where she conducts research under the CIF Project and leads the legal aspects of the Starlight Project. She earned her doctorate in law from Galatasaray University in 2022, specializing in criminal law, data protection, and the impact of AI on criminal justice. During her PhD, she conducted research at the University of Florence (Dec 2019 – Mar 2020) and was a Swiss Government Excellence Scholar at the University of Basel (Oct 2020 – Sep 2021). Prior to her academic career, she was a licensed lawyer in Istanbul, focusing on media, criminal, and human rights law.

Speaker

Pablo Trigo Kramcsák

Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) - Belgium

Pablo Trigo Kramcsák is a doctoral researcher at the Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) research group and a member of the Cyber and Data Security Lab (CDSL) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). He is also an affiliated researcher at the Center of Law, Technology, and Society (CE3), University of Chile. His research focuses on lawful grounds for big data processing, the application of the GDPR to AI system development, and cross-border data flow regulations. Pablo holds an LLB from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and an LL.M. in International Law from the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg and the University of Chile.