Prof. Stefan Schiffner in panel discussion at the Annual Privacy Forum 2025

Focus on data protection

After a long day of presentations and discussions on privacy, Michael Friedewald (Fraunhofer ISI & Plattform Privatheit), Kai Rannenberg (Goethe University Frankfurt), Prokopios Drogkaris (ENISA), and Stefan Schiffner (Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences) discussed the importance and challenges of creating and maintaining a subject-matter community.

Current challenges and European perspectives

This was a particularly relevant topic in light of Fabienne Tegeler’s (ENISA) opening talk in the morning, in which she explained the reasons why ENISA is scaling back its support for the event — despite acknowledging that privacy plays a vital role in cybersecurity and that a profound understanding of the interrelation between privacy and cybersecurity is essential.

Exciting insights into research and practice

Other contributions during the first day highlighted the complexity of the socio-technical challenges surrounding privacy. Topics ranged from new technologies and their impact on privacy — such as Marta Beltrán’s question “Interfacing Human Brains: What Could Go Wrong?” — to Harshvardhan J. Pandit’s analysis “Simple Now, Complex Later: The Questionable Efficacy of Diluting GDPR Article 30(5)”, which discussed how minimal the actual savings are from reducing documentation obligations.

Data protection as a collective task

Overall, it became clear that data protection remains a dynamic field of research that closely links technological, social, and organizational aspects and that it can hardly be further developed without a strong, committed community of experts.

On day 2 of the annual privacy forum, Frank Pallas, EXDIGIT Professor of Privacy Engineering and Policy-Aligned Systems from Paris Lodron University Salzburg closed the event with his remarks “On principles, non-functional properties and technical experiments – Building solid techno-legal bridges in Privacy Engineering“. Most notably, Frank is inviting the community to Salzburg next September (Sep 8-10 2026) for the next edition of APF. Keep your eyes peeled for more info at https://privacyforum.eu/