_Corporate Social Responsibility
28/01/2026
Data Protection Day 2026
On the occasion of Data Protection Day, I want to send you my warm greetings and share a few reflections with you. Privacy and personal data protection are undergoing a period of transformation. We are, in fact, in the midst of a substantial reform at the European level involving a wide range of regulations that […]
11/09/2025
Advancing Digital Responsibility: Highlights from our Annual Permanent Stakeholder Working Group Meeting
On 9 September 2025, at the European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity (ECPC), we hosted our annual onsite meeting of the Permanent Stakeholder Working Group on Data Protection & Cybersecurity as Corporate Social Responsibilities. The meeting brought together both long-standing and new members of the Group, and resulted in additional signatories to the Digital Pact, […]
25/05/2023
5 years of the GDPR: A call for sustainability
Today we celebrate 5 years of GDPR enforcement, the “birthday” of our revolutionary European legal data protection framework. Each year, I look forward to this anniversary and take time to reflect on the past, present, and future of data protection. While criticizing enforcement of the GDPR seems to be in vogue as of late, I […]
14/06/2022
Serious Privacy Podcast appearance – “The fourth leg of ESG: a Privacy Framework”
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Paul Breitbarth of Catawiki and Dr. K Royal of Outschool for the Serious Privacy podcast, check out the episode here! During the podcast we discuss my research on the topic of Data Protection as a Corporate Social Responsibility which aims to improve data protection and data security for a […]
28/01/2022
#DataProtectionDay: Committing to Transparency in 2022 with ECPC Data Protection Icons
Today is International Data Protection Day, in celebration of the 41st anniversary of the first binding international treaty concerning the topic of data protection being opened for signature: the Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data.[1] Since the early 1980s, both the quantity and economic importance of data […]
13/08/2021
How data minimization, data quality, and storage limitation can help in the fight against climate change
Over the last 20 years, access to cheap computational capacity has increasingly led to the harvesting of more and more personal data, without having to worry too much about costs related to data storage and processing activities. For this very reason (and all too often), data sets are offhandedly replicated, databases are left unmanaged, and the same […]
20/10/2020
AI & Cybersecurity: Reflections on a multidimensional relationship
Earlier this month I was a guest on Episode 47: Innovation and Tech Zoom In of the European Edition of the Breaking Banks Podcast Moderated by Ajit Tripathi. The podcast looks at “European Unicorns, Startups, Founders, Regulators and Leaders innovating the rapidly evolving Fintech scene, with some of the world’s most well-known hosts and influencers in fintech. Produced in cooperation with FintechStage.” […]
11/02/2020
Happy Safer Internet Day: A call for data security by design
Today, Safer Internet Day, represents a good opportunity to remind organizations of the importance of embedding data protection and security into the design of processes, products and services. This consideration is, in fact, embodied in the first principle of five which I have identified as the foundation of Socially Responsible Data Protection and which are […]
07/02/2020
Successful kick-off of the Data Protection as a Corporate Social Responsibility project
Yesterday, 6 February 2020, the Data Protection as a Corporate Social Responsibility project kick-off meeting was held within the European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity (ECPC) within the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University. The project aims to trigger virtuous data protection competition between companies by creating an environment that identifies and promotes data protection […]
28/01/2020
Launching the Data Protection as a Corporate Social Responsibility research project at ECPC
There’s no better day than today, European Data Protection Day, to announce the 6 February kickoff meeting of the Data Protection as a Corporate Social Responsibility Research Project that I am leading at the European Centre on Privacy & Cybersecurity (ECPC) at Maastricht University. In our data-centric global economy businesses need to consider privacy and data protection as assets rather than […]