Data Protection Legislation & Ethics

Fully booked

This course aims at studying the main regulatory implications of technology, as well as the EU ethical and legal framework applicable to information technologies, with a focus on the data-driven technologies. It will address issues such as ethical and legal governance, ethical and legal principles and requirements, risk assessment approaches to the design, development, deployment and use of data-driven technologies.

During the course, students will carry out different types of activities. A large part of the learning is acquired outside the classroom, through the autonomous study of the student. This study is complemented with the reading of hard-law and soft-law instruments and case-law, and specialised papers, as well as the preparation and writing of assignments and activities.

Class attendance is essential because there will be several theoretical sessions, necessary for developing the assignments and activities. In addition, a large part of these activities is performed in class hours, and consists of the participation in debates, solving questions related with the main ethical and legal issues that data-driven technologies may pose, and also giving oral presentations.

Data Protection Legislation & Ethics
Week	Contents	Teaching / learning activities
1	Internet Regulation	Origin, evolution and future of new technologies. - Regulation of online content in the EU. - Legal regime of ISPs, audio-visual services and telecommunications services. - Net neutrality. - Liability of intermediaries. - Assignment 1.
2	Data Protection	An overview of the GDPR and its provisions - Privacy and Data Protection by Design - Privacy Enhancing Technologies - Dark Web - Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies –– Assignment 2.
3	Ethics	Overview of ethical principles applicable to data-driven technologies – Notes on the draft of the Artificial Intelligence Act – Conducting ethical impact assessments – Ethical sandboxes as a framework for algorithmic governance –– Assignment 3.

The evaluation will consist of 5 different activities:

Three assignments to be conducted and submitted in class (20% each) at the end of each week

Submission of all class activities (20%)

Attendance and participation in class (20%).

The dates for the 3 assignments are 16, 23 and 30 July 2023.

Students who for justifiable reasons have not been able to submit one of the three assignments on the specific date, may have the possibility to do an extra activity under the criteria indicated by the lecturer. The conditions of eligibility for this extra activity are strict and decided on a case-by-case basis. A student who cheats or tries to cheat in an exam will be given a 0. A student who submits a paper or a practical exercise in which evidence of plagiarism can be identified will be given a 0 and will receive a warning. The material and language of the course is English.

Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation).
European Data Protection Board (2020). Guidelines 05/2020 on consent under Regulation 2016/679 (Version 1.1).
IEEE, Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems
High-Level Expert Group on AI, Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI
Mantelero, Alessandro (2018): “AI and Big Data: A blueprint for a human rights, social and ethical impact assessment”. Computer Law & Security Review, vol. 34, Issue 4, pp. 754- 772.
Blasi Casagran Cristina (2016): Global data protection in the field of law enforcement: An EU perspective, Routledge. Taylor & Francis Group, Oxfordshire, UK, June 2016. ISBN-10: 1138655384.
Savin, Andrej (2013): EU Internet Law, Editorial Elgar European Law, Glos (UK), 2013.

Besides this bibliography, the lecturer will provide other appropriate and up-to-date resources, along with legal and soft-law texts. In addition, the lecturer will indicate what pieces are of obligatory reading and study, and what are recommendable.

Links web:

Dr. Cristina Blasi is Assistant Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She is a researcher and lecturer of EU Law and Public Participation in the EU institutions in the Law Faculty. After she completed her Law Degree in 2007, she completed a Masters degree on EU integration (Barcelona, 2008), a LL.M. on EU Law (Saarland, 2009) and a LL.M on Comparative, European and International Laws (Florence, 2011). She completed her Ph.D. in Law at the European University Institute (Florence, 2015), in which she specialised on EU privacy and data protection law. As for her professional experience, she carried out paid internships at the Legal Service of the European Commission (2010), the European Supervisor of Data Protection (2012) and Europol (2013). Dr Blasi has 10 years of teaching experience to undergraduate and graduate students at several universities, and she is currently coordinating the H2020 project “IT methods and tools for managing migration FLOWS” (ITFLOWS), and the Erasmus+ Jean Monnet Module “EUCONAS”.

E-mail: cristina.blasi@uab.cat

Dr. Jorge González-Conejero graduated in Computer Science at the UAB (2003). He holds a PhD in Computer Science. He is currently Executive Director at the UAB-IDT. His research interests are focused on Image and Video Processing, Knowledge acquisition and Data Protection. He has authored and coauthored over 30 contributions to international conferences, indexed international journals and book chapters. He has 8 years of experience participating in European and national research projects. He serves as reviewer and program committee in several journals and Series (among them, the LGTS at Springer). Previous participation in EU projects: CAPER - Collaborative information, Acquisition, Processing, Exploitation and Reporting for the prevention of organised crime (261712-FP7-SEC-2010-1), SAVASA- Standards based approach to video archive, search and analysis (285621-FP7- SEC- 2011-1) and Building Interoperability for European Civil Proceedings Online JLS/2009/JCIV/AG/0035).

E-mail: jorge.gonzalez.conejero@uab.cat

Dr. Emma Teodoro obtained a PhD Degree in Political Science and Public Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She was a member of the UAB Sociolegal Studies Group for 11 years (1994-2004) and has participated in a number of research projects on law and technology, judicial systems, legal professions, documentary editions for education and research, self-regulation through codes of best professional practices within the audio-visual sector, and ICT ethical aspects. Her research areas cover legal organizations, judicial systems, ethnography of legal institutions and legal organizations, audio-visual and media policies, law and image, privacy and data protection. She is currently a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Law and Technology. She has participated in multiple European projects as ethical partner such as SEKT, CAPER, TAKEDOWN, LYNX, ITFLOWS and OPTIMAI. She has also been Lecturer in Legal Theory (Law/Criminology Degrees) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB).

E-mail: emma.teodoro@uab.cat

Dr. Andrea Guillén holds an LLM. in Innovation, Technology and the Law from the University of Edinburgh (2020) and is currently a PhD law student at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She joined the Institute of Law and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2020 as Junior Researcher. She has participated in several European Projects as ethical partner: SPIRIT (686993-SEC-12-FCT-2016-2017), ITFLOWS (882986-H2020-SU-BES 01-2018-2019-2020) (ongoing) and OPTIMAI - Optimizing Manufacturing Processes through Artificial Intelligence and Virtualization (H2020-(IA) DT-FOF-11-2020) (ongoing). She is the Secretary of the IEEE Standards Association program ‘Meta Issues in Cybersecurity’.

E-mail: andrea.guillen@uab.cat
Department of Public Procedure and Historicalprocessing Sciences

Data Protection Legislation & Ethics

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