The Sixth Interdisciplinary Summerschool on Privacy (ISP 2025)
The sixth Interdisciplinary Summerschool on Privacy will take place July 6 - 11, 2025, at hotel Erica, Berg en Dal, the Netherlands.This year's topic: Digitalization of the Public Sector: Risks, Rights, and Resistance.
Registration is now open!
The interdisciplinary summerschool on privacy provides an intensive one week academic post-graduate programme teaching privacy from a technical, legal and social perspective. The goal of the summerschool is to provide students with a solid background in the theory of privacy construction, modelling and protection from these three different perspectives. It also aims to help them to establish a first international network with peers and senior academics across these disparate disciplines.
Digitalization of the Public Sector: Risks, Rights, and Resistance
We aim to ask what are the risks to privacy and data protection that arise with the widespread outsourcing of public IT and services to dominant corporate providers? How far does this process enable providers to impose their terms of data processing on the state and to gain access to scarce and sensitive citizen data? Can this further entrench the dominance of private IT actors while deepening the state's dependency and exacerbating the vulnerability of its residents to power aysmmetries? From a citizen's perspective, essential services increasingly require smartphones, limiting accessibility and reinforcing digital exclusion. Meanwhile, examples like digital contact tracing and digital identity wallets show how the balance of power between public and private actors can be reshaped. How do these developments impact accountability of relevant actors and raise concerns, such as the expansion of public and private surveillance capacities?
While we will focus on privacy, the lectures will also touch on the extent to which private companies consider the interests of affected stakeholders, public values, and contextual norms when entering public sectors. Lectures will touch on examples of resistance, strategies, and concepts like critical data literacy, data disentanglement, friction, and sphere transgressions that can foster citizen awareness, agency, and emancipation. While working on case studies, we will consider how we should design data-driven systems that uphold the public interest and common good.