About the Book
This book presents insights from the 2025 CPDP.ai international conference, where leading scholars, policy makers, and practitioners examine how Europe's fast-evolving digital frameworks shape global debates. As the EU legislates at unprecedented speed, it not only regulates technologies such as AI, but also defines their governance through rights-based instruments including the AI Act, the Data Act, and the GDPR.
The chapters analyse the consolidation of the EU model of AI and data governance, covering topics such as Fundamental Rights Impact Assessments, proportionality, transparency obligations for companion chatbots, and transatlantic contrasts in AI and health-data regulation. Contributors explore how divergent legal traditions influence accountability and democratic oversight, and how emerging duties-such as the duty of loyalty in data processing-could rebalance power between citizens and infrastructures. Other chapters address data access under the Data Act, empirical supervision of algorithmic profiling, and proposals to strengthen GDPR enforcement.
Opening with The World Is Watching, an artistic and philosophical reflection on perception, opacity, and the more-than-human in surveillance societies, the book bridges critical theory and regulatory practice. A dedicated Practitioners' Corner connects real-world governance experience with academic insight, highlighting pressing challenges for the year ahead.
Uniting law, technology, and ethics, this interdisciplinary volume captures Europe's effort to govern AI and data infrastructures-under the close gaze of a watching world.
Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
1. The World is Watching: Perception, Opacity, and the More-than-Human in Surveillance Societies, James Bridle (Artist, Greece), Thierry Vandenbussche and Birte Vingerhoets (Privacy Salon, Belgium)
2. Geopolitics, AI and DP, Mireille Hildebrandt (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Part 2: Academic Insights
3. Navigating Disruption: The Case of the European AI Act, Anna-Julia Saiger (University of Freiburg, Germany)
4. Embedding Proportionality in the Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment, Oreste Pollicino and Federica Paolucci (Bocconi University, Italy), Giovanni De Gregorio (Católica Global School of Law, Portugal), Andrea Cosentini, Andrea Ermellino, Dario Fontanella, Nicole Inverardi, Ilaria Penco, Daniele Regoli and Silvia Tessaro Trapani (Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy)
5. Navigating Transparency Obligations for Companion Chatbots under the European Union AI Act: Evaluation and Policy Directions, Rachael Olaitan Aborishade (Nigerian Bar Association, Nigeria)
6. Watching the Watchers: Health Data, Artificial Intelligence, and the Trans-Atlantic Rebalancing of Privacy Power, Gary Hsuanyu Liu (Washington University School of Law, USA)
7. EU–US AI Divergences and the Effect on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework: Call for a Brussels/Sacramento Effect, Anže Erbežnik (European Faculty of Law, Slovenia), David E. Harris (University of California, USA) and Owen Doyle (Harris Research Group, USA)
8. Technical Standards: Co-Regulatory Pathways for Digital Policymaking, Emma Semaan (University of Oxford, UK)
9. Transitioning from Portability in the GDPR to Access in the Data Act: A Multidisciplinary Analysis of Data Access by Design, Emanuela Podda (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy), Nicola Leschke (University of Salzburg, Austria), Pierangela Samarati (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy) and Frank Pallas (University of Salzburg, Austria)
Part 3: Practitioners' Corner
10. Unlocking DPO Happiness: Strategies for C-Level Executives and DPOs, Jolien Ghyselinck (National Institute for Criminalistics and Criminology, Belgium) and Peter Berghmans (Data Protection Institute, Belgium)
11. Empirical Methods for Supervising Algorithmic Profiling Systems, Jurriaan Parie and Ylja Remmits (NGO Algorithm Audit, Netherlands), Brinn Hekkelman and Mark Kattenberg (Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, Netherlands)
12. Quo Vadis GDPR? Ex Orco Usque ad Coelum: A Call to Fundamentally Reshape GDPR Enforcement Mechanics, Charles Helleputte (King & Spalding, Belgium)
Part 4: EDPS Closing Remarks
13. The World Is Watching – CPDP Conferences – Closing Remarks, Wojciech Wiewiórowski (European Data Protection Supervisor, Poland)
About the Author :
Jonas Breuer holds a PhD in Media and Communication Studies from Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a PhD in Social Sciences from Hasselt University, Belgium; he co-directs the CPDP conferences.
Dara Hallinan is a legal academic at FIZ Karlsruhe, Germany.
Paul De Hert is Professor of Law at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.
Manos Roussos is PhD researcher at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, Tilburg University, the Netherlands.
