Jointly organised with the Brussels Privacy Hub, the Conference ‘Jurisdiction, Conflicts of Laws and Data Protection in Cyberspace’ intends to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the challenges to the protection of privacy in the Digital Age.

Thanks to the Internet, people who are thousands of miles apart can effortlessly engage in social interactions, business transactions and scientific dialogue. As pointed in by John Perry Barlow in his famous ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, all these activities rely – more or less consciously – on sophisticated data-exchanges which take place ‘ both everywhere and nowhere’, lying outside the borders of any particular State.

Against this backdrop, the regulatory challenge posed by the ephemeral nature of the information exchanged via the Web – and of the Web itself – is twofold. While Private International Law struggles to frame the allegedly borderless nature of cyberspace within the dominant discourses of law and territoriality, Data Protection Law has to reconcile the individuals’ fundamental right to privacy with the public interests connected to the processing of personal data.

The conference will explore some of the most controversial issues lying at the intersection between these two areas of law, by addressing, in particular, the problems arising in connection with cross-border telematics exchanges of data in the field of biomedical research and the contractual relationships stemming from social networking and the use of social media.