The Berkman Center and MIT Welcome European Data Protection Supervisor Giovanni Buttarelli

The Berkman Center co-hosted European Data Protection Supervisor Giovanni Buttarelli for a day-long program on Tuesday, April 19 in collaboration with the Internet Policy Research Initiative at MIT and the MIT Media Lab. 

Appointed as EDPS in 2014, Mr. Buttarelli has become an influential voice in the digital privacy space. Most recently, he worked with U.S. policymakers to address concerns over the EU-US Privacy Shield agreement, and with the European Commission to adopt the General Data Protection Regulation.

During a public speech at MIT on Tuesday, Mr. Buttarelli addressed these and other topics to a crowd of academics and practitioners. After a brief summary of data protection legal history, he stressed the historic impact of the new General Data Privacy Regulation recently adopted by 28 member states. (Full text of his speech is here.)

By mimicking antitrust law and implementing accountability and enforcement mechanisms, the new regulation introduces novel concepts into EU law and provides unprecedented data protection measures for users.

“This is an historic development,” said Mr. Buttarelli. “In a globalised economy, it affects every country in the world which trades with the EU, whether offering services to people in the EU or monitoring their behaviour.”

Looking towards the formulation of future data protection measures, he emphasized the need to address ethical considerations of every approach. These ethical values can be identified along four lines; first, consideration of human dignity as enumerated in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights; second, analysis of the impact of a data-driven society on individual rights and the functioning of democracy; third, thoughtfulness surrounding the ethical dimension of data processing; and fourth, moral, legal, engineering and philosophical implications of big data. These ethical considerations should underpin all discussions of future technologies, he said. 

After the speech, the Berkman Center hosted Mr. Buttarelli for a roundtable discussion where Berkman researchers presented the Center’s recent work on data privacy including financial privacy, cybersecurity, and student privacy. After the discussion, he visited Professor Gasser’s Comparative Online Privacy course at Harvard Law School where students have grappled all year with issues that arise from data collection, use, and storage.

Post written by Amy Zhang.