Roundtable on anonymisation and digital regulations, with a particular focus upon EC preliminary findings against Alphabet on Article 6(11) DMA compliance.
This roundtable will examine the growing centrality of anonymisation in EU digital regulations, with particular focus on the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Recent enforcement developments, most notably the European Commission preliminary findings on the sharing of search data, confirm that anonymisation and re-identification risk now lie at the heart of the policy debate.
The roundtable’s first objective is to understand how the Commission seeks to combine technical and contractual controls, why it appears to favour a heuristics-based approach over more formalised anonymisation models, and what alternative approaches could offer in terms of privacy guarantees and utility preservation.
The discussion will then situate these developments within the broader regulatory context of the proposed Digital Omnibus package, which includes amendments to the definition of personal data in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and, through a new Article 41a, seeks to recalibrate the institutional balance between the Commission and the European Data Protection Board (EDPB).
Against this backdrop, the roundtable asks whether the EU is witnessing the emergence of a new governance model for anonymisation, one shaped less by horizontal instruments than by sector-specific measures. Roundtable participants will discuss the implications of these trends for privacy protection and regulatory coherence across the EU digital rulebook.
The roundtable will be conducted under Chatham House Rules.
Moderator: Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon (Brussels Privacy Hub).
Practical Information:
Date: 18 May 2026
Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Venue: hybrid: LIC Learning & Innovation Center ULB-VUB
Programme:
Opening Remarks:
European Commission
Guest Interventions:
Round 1: Alba Ribera Martínez (Universidad Villanueva); David Sánchez (Universitat Rovira i Virgili); Pierre Lison (Norwegian Computing Center); Yurii Sushko (Google)
Round 2: Sebastião De Barros Vale (EDPS); Giuseppe d’Aquisto (Garante, Italy); Cédric Lauradoux (INRIA, France)
For more info and registration see here.