“Law + Technology: Fine-Tuning a new Regulatory Approach to Personal Data Anonymisation”

A cargo de Dr. Emanuela Podda (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italia)

Anonymising personal data is generally understood as a typical optimisation problem.

Following this imprint, the regulatory approach – initiated in 1995 with the Data Protection Directive and further strengthened in 2018 with the General Data Protection Regulation – did not favour or promote specific techniques over others. Relying on a risk-based approach, it imposed a risk test on the reversibility of anonymised data.

However, in recent decades, legal scholars have witnessed not only technological progress in anonymisation techniques, but also a remarkable increase in their reversibility, leading to advocacy for more technical specification in the regulatory approach.

Using a cross-sector method that goes beyond the risk-based approach, the seminar proposes a new regulatory approach to realise the full potential of anonymisation and related techniques.

It draws inspiration from the critical case of the U.S. 2020 Census, as well as from new initiatives in the U.S. which, in contrast to the regulatory approach taken in Europe, seem to be clearly shaping anonymisation policy based on more technical specifications.