When people hear the word standards, they often think of plugs, connectors, protocols, or machines that need to work together. But standards do much more than enable interoperability between physical systems. They can also help shape less visible, yet deeply important, properties of digital systems—among them privacy and data protection, both closely connected to fundamental rights and European values.
This webinar offers an accessible introduction to the landscape of standards in privacy and data protection for undergraduate and graduate students from different backgrounds. It will begin with the basics of standardization through the "five W's" of standards: what standards are, why they matter to professionals and organizations, who develops them, how they are developed and applied, and where they are used in information and communication technologies. From there, the talk will explore how law and technical standards interact, including the different ways EU legislation can rely on, encourage, or mandate standardization.
The session will also connect legal ideas to technical realities. What does the GDPR have to do with database design, software architecture, or cloud deployment models? How can broad legal principles be translated into concrete technical properties? To answer these questions, the talk will present how existing privacy standards support the design, development, and assessment of software systems.
Finally, it will look ahead to generative AI, where privacy standardization is becoming an especially active and challenging field. In a world where values must be engineered as well as defended, standards are part of the bridge.
