Sebastião Barros Vale serves as Senior Counsel at the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), where he is following and analyzing privacy and data protection European and national case law, recent academic research, guidelines, and decisions from the European Data Protection Board and national Data Protection Authorities. He actively monitors the activity of EU institutions around privacy and data protection, including Communications and Proposals of the European Commission and legislative reports from the European Parliament and the Council of the EU.
He completed a traineeship at the Cabinet of EU Commissioner Věra Jourová, where he contributed to the 1st Annual Review of the EU-US Privacy Shield and to the Commission Guidance on the applicability of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As a qualified lawyer in Portugal, he practiced at the ICT practice area of Vieira de Almeida e Associados, assisting clients from the healthcare, retail, energy and financial sectors in complying with the GDPR and other privacy-related laws. Just before joining FPF, he worked as an in-house privacy expert at Johnson & Johnson.
Sebastião holds an LL.M in EU Law from the College of Europe (2016, Belgium), where he wrote his thesis on alternative international data transfer mechanisms after the invalidation of the EU-US Safe Harbour Decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union. Two notable papers he published focused on the interplay between the GDPR and the EU’s DIrective on digital payment services (PSD2), and on how European anti-discrimination, consumer, and data protection rules shield consumers against pervasive online price personalization.
