Data Protection as a Field of Ongoing Power Struggle in European Politics

Katarzyna Szymielewicz is a human rights lawyer and activist. She is the co-founder and president of Panoptykon Foundation – a Polish NGO defending human rights in the context of contemporary forms of surveillance. Since 2012 she is the vice-president of European Digital Rights. She is also a board member of Tactical Technology Collective, Amnesty International (Poland) and the WebWeWant campaign. She graduated from the University of Warsaw (Law) and the School of Oriental and African Studies (Development Studies). She is active in many recent European campaigns regarding digital rights, i.e. activism against blanket data retention, Internet blocking and ACTA and towards better data protection standards online.

Malte Spitz is an author, activist and politician. He lives in Berlin with his wife and two kids. Spitz is a member of the board of the German Green Party and works as a data protection consultant. He published his book What are you doing with my data? in 2014 . He sued Deutsche Telekom for hisretention data and published the data in an interactive visualisation in 2011.