This book presents insights from the 2025 CPDP.ai international conference, where leading scholars, policy makers, and practitioners examine how Europe's fast-evolving digital frameworks shape global debates. As the EU legislates at unprecedented speed, it not only regulates technologies such as AI, but also defines their governance through rights-based instruments including the AI Act, the Data Act, and the GDPR.
The chapters analyse the consolidation of the EU model of AI and data governance, covering topics such as Fundamental Rights Impact Assessments, proportionality, transparency obligations for companion chatbots, and transatlantic contrasts in AI and health-data regulation. Contributors explore how divergent legal traditions influence accountability and democratic oversight, and how emerging duties-such as the duty of loyalty in data processing-could rebalance power between citizens and infrastructures. Other chapters address data access under the Data Act, empirical supervision of algorithmic profiling, and proposals to strengthen GDPR enforcement.
Opening with The World Is Watching, an artistic and philosophical reflection on perception, opacity, and the more-than-human in surveillance societies, the book bridges critical theory and regulatory practice. A dedicated Practitioners' Corner connects real-world governance experience with academic insight, highlighting pressing challenges for the year ahead.
Uniting law, technology, and ethics, this interdisciplinary volume captures Europe's effort to govern AI and data infrastructures-under the close gaze of a watching world.
Jonas Breuer holds a PhD in Media and Communication Studies from Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a PhD in Social Sciences from Hasselt University, Belgium; he co-directs the CPDP conferences.
Paul De Hert is Professor of Law at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. He is the Director of the research group on Fundamental Rights and Constitutionalism and senior member of the research group on Law, Science, Technology & Society. He is also Associate Professor of Law and Technology at the Tilburg Institute for Law and Technology and Co-Director of the Brussels Privacy Hub.
Dara Hallinan is a legal academic working in the intellectual property rights department at FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure, Germany. He is editor of the data protection law bi-weekly Data Protection Insider and is programme director for CPDP.
Manos Roussos is PhD researcher at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society, Tilburg University, the Netherlands.
