Brussels Privacy Symposium Report 2024

This year’s Brussels Privacy Symposium, held on 8 October 2024, convened global stakeholders from across Europe and beyond for in-depth discussions on the EU AI Act in the context of the broader EU digital ecosystem. Co-organized jointly by the Future of Privacy Forum and the Brussels Privacy Hub of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the eighth edition of the Symposium was a melting pot of brilliant minds from across academia, regulatory authorities and policymakers, industry, and civil society. 

In addition to three expert panels exploring notions of risk and impact assessments across the EU digital rulebook, prohibitions and obligations for sensitive data processing, and an increasingly complex enforcement landscape, the organizers also welcomed Mark Scott, Senior Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab for the Opening Keynote. With previous roles as chief technology correspondent for Politico, and more than a decade as correspondent for the New York Times, Scott provided a thorough and frank analysis of Europe’s “digital challenge” as the focus shifts from rulemaking to enforcement. 

For this year’s program, Professor Adriana Iamnitchi, Chair of Computational Social Sciences at Maastricht University, presented research findings from a cutting-edge project analyzing search trends and patterns on prominent social media platforms to identify mis/disinformation. And finally, European Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiórowski and Professor Gloria González-Fuster of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel sat together for a candid closing dialogue on the future of data protection. 

In the Report of the Brussels Privacy Symposium 2024, you can read the key takeaways from the highlights mentioned above, along with many more practical and actionable insights on the complex interplay between the different elements of the EU data strategy architecture.