Dr. Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna is a globally recognized data protection law expert, with 15 years of experience in the field split between Europe and the U.S., spanning academia, public service, consulting and policy. She currently is Vice President for Global Privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, a global non-profit headquartered in Washington DC, coordinating FPF’s offices and partners in Brussels, Tel Aviv, Singapore, Nairobi, and New Delhi, and leading the work on global privacy and data protection developments related to new technologies, including AI. She is also a founding Advisory Board Member of Women in AI Governance, and an affiliated researcher to the LSTS Center of Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Dr. Zanfir-Fortuna worked for the European Data Protection Supervisor and is a member of the Reference Panel of the Global Privacy Assembly – the international organization reuniting data protection authorities around the world, as well as a member of the T20 engagement group of the G20 under Brazil’s Presidency in 2024.
She was elected to be part of the Executive Committee of ACM’s Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FaccT) Conference (2021-2022). Her scholarship on the GDPR is referenced by the Court of Justice of the EU, and in 2023 she won the Stefano Rodota Award of the Council of Europe for the paper “The Thin Red Line: Refocusing Data Protection Law on Automated-Decision-Making“, alongside her co-authors. Dr. Zanfir-Fortuna holds a PhD in Law with a thesis on the rights of the data subject under EU Data Protection Law, and an LLM in Human Rights (University of Craiova).
Keynotes
Privacy Preserving Artificial Intelligence Workshop of the 38th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference, Vancouver, 2024: “Unregulated? Think Again. Unpacking all the meaningful ways in which data privacy law regulates Generative AI” (download presentation)
University of Michigan, 2022 Privacy@Michigan Keynote, “Beyond Privacy: Fairness in How Personal Data is Used in our New Digital World” (watch recording)
World Bank Group Data Privacy Day, 2022, Keynote Panel (watch recording)
IAPP Data Protection Congress, Brussels, 2019, Opening Keynote Panel (readout)
Publications
“Follow the (personal) Data: Positioning Data Protection Law as the Cornerstone of EU’s ‘Fit for the Digital Age’ Legislative Package“, chapter in “Two Decades of Personal Data Protection. What’s Next?”, EDPS Anniversary Volume, 2024 (Open Access)
“The General Data Protection Regulation: A Commentary“, edited by C. Kuner, C. Docksey and L.A. Bygrave, Chapters on Articles 13, 14, 15, 21 and 82 of the GDPR (Oxford University Press, 2020)
“Protectia Datelor Personale. Drepturile Persoanei Vizate“, C.H. Beck, Bucharest, 2014 (Beckshop).
Awards
Stefano Rodota Award, Council of Europe, 2023, for “The Thin Red Line: Refocusing Data Protection Law on Automated-Decision-Making“, together with co-authors.
Finalist of the Danilo Doneda Award, Brazil, 2022, for “”The Thin Red Line: Refocusing Data Protection Law on Automated-Decision-Making“, together with co-authors.
Junior Scholar Award, CPDP 2013, for “Tracing the Right to Be Forgotten in the Short History of Data Protection Law: The New Clothes of an Old Right“
