The Community is based on courses from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), University of Warwick (WU) and CY Cergy-Paris (CY). These courses are interdisciplinary and include elements from computer science, law, and social sciences. The aim of this LC is to approach key issues related to the fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics of digital technologies and their social dimensions.
The Community is partially based on existing courses where the participating professors are involved, as follows:
- At Universitat Pompeu Fabra, a course named FATE on personal data processing, data-driven decision support, and automated decision-making.
- At Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a course on Privacy and Data Protection Law at the Faculty of Law & Criminology. It includes activities such as learning by sharing experiences on submitting and following up data access requests.
- At University of Warwick, the course on Data Visualisation in Science, Culture and Public Policy at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies.
- At CY Cergy Paris University, the course on “Transparency and Fairness in Big Data and AI Algorithms” on the Research Master of Research in Computer Science and the course “Data Protection and New Digital Tools” from MA Political Ideas in a Digital Age.
The Community is currently focused on understanding the use of Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) as an educational tool. A DSAR is a request initiated by an individual and addressed to an organisation that exercises the right of that individual to receive a copy of the personal data processed about them by that organisation.
Learning Community Activities
Past Events
2023
On 6 November 2023, students of “Data Protection and New Digital Tools” (at CY Cergy Paris University) of Prof. Dimitrios Kotzinos will present the findings of their work on the right of access to the students following VUB’s classes on “Privacy and data protection law” with Prof. Gloria González Fuster (VUB).
The 2023-2024 academic year kicked off with parallel activities at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and CY Cergy Paris University. On 3 October 2023, Prof. Gloria González Fuster (VUB) delivered a lecture on “The right of access: How to ask for your data, and why” to Prof. Dimitrios Kotzinos’ students of “Data Protection and New Digital Tools” from MA Political Ideas in a Digital Age at CY Cergy Paris University.
For 2023, the FATE LC is planned to conduct a second iteration of this exercise, this time involving students from UPF and WU. Similarly, the activity will start with a presentation from Prof. Gloria González Fuster (VUB) to the students of Prof. Noortje Marres (at UW) and Prof. Carlos Castillo (at UPF) planned for February 8th, 2023.
The presentation of completed projects and progress reports is planned for March 15th, 2023. Additionally, a presentation of the final results from the students at VUB that participated in the activity starting in 2022, is planned to take place later in 2023.
Following cross-campus exchanges, the VUB team created a podcast reflecting on the lessons learned. The interdisciplinary approach allowed students to think about how reconcile different rights and interests, as well as different disciplinary perspectives.
2022
The kick-off meeting of the LC took place on June 7th, 2022, as an in-person meeting of the professors involved at CY.
In the first semester of 2022, the FATE LC piloted a joint activity involving students from CY and VUB. At VUB, a group of students started working on the legal issues around the use of personal data access requests as an educational tool. Taking as a starting point the concrete interest of the learning community in study data processing practices through data access requests, and working as a team, they were assigned the task of identifying the main legal challenges of organising coordinated access request in the context of education.
At CY, students self-organized in groups and each participant was given the same initial task: to perform a DSAR and to document the process of receiving a response. Then, group members were asked to jointly reflect and discuss both about the process of receiving an answer to the DSAR, as well as the contents of the received data.
This activity started on October 11th, 2022, with a presentation from Prof. Gloria González Fuster (VUB) to the students of Prof. Dimitrios Kotzinos (CY). A second gathering took place on November 29th, 2022, where students at CY presented their results and students at VUB presented a progress report.
Students’ presentations highlighted numerous learnings that they obtained from this exercise, including increased awareness of the types of data being captured and stored by the services they use every day, and increased awareness of both the rights of data subject, as well as of the remaining obstacles towards effectively exercising those rights.
How to Get Involved
(Students and educators)
Contact the EUTOPIA curriculum team: Jo Angouri (J.Angouri@warwick.ac.uk) and Karen Triquet (karen.triquet@vub.be).