Anu H. Bradford is a Finnish-American author, law professor, and expert in international trade law. In 2014, she was named the Henry L. Moses Distinguished Professor of Law and International Organization at the Columbia Law School. She is the author of “Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology” and “The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World”.

Anu Bradford attended Harvard Law School on a Fulbright Scholarship, graduating with another Master of Laws degree from Harvard in 2002. After time in Brussels with the law firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, working on EU competition law, she returned to the US, joining the faculty at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of law. She later joined Columbia Law School as a professor of law and an expert in international trade law. She has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and in 2024, she was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research for her book Digital Empires.

With Anu we are finally looking at EU Digital Policy, including personal data protection and privacy, from a geopolitical and international trade perspective.

References:

* Anu Bradford (Wikipedia)

* Anu Bradford on LinkedIn

* Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford University Press, 2023)

* The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford University Press, 2019)

* EU-US trade figures 2023 (EU Commission, Trade Policy)

* Lukasz Olejnik: Propaganda, misinformation, the DSA, Section 230, and the US elections (Masters of Privacy, November 2024).

Dr. Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna is a globally recognized data protection law expert, with 15 years of experience in the field split between Europe and the U.S., spanning academia, public service, consulting and policy. She currently is Vice President for Global Privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, a global non-profit headquartered in Washington DC, coordinating FPF’s offices and partners in Brussels, Tel Aviv, Singapore, Nairobi, and New Delhi, and leading the work on global privacy and data protection developments related to new technologies, including AI. She is also a founding Advisory Board Member of Women in AI Governance, and an affiliated researcher to the LSTS Center of Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Dr. Zanfir-Fortuna worked for the European Data Protection Supervisor and is a member of the Reference Panel of the Global Privacy Assembly – the international organization reuniting data protection authorities around the world, as well as a member of the T20 engagement group of the G20 under Brazil’s Presidency in 2024.

She was elected to be part of the Executive Committee of ACM’s Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FaccT) Conference (2021-2022). Her scholarship on the GDPR is referenced by the Court of Justice of the EU, and in 2023 she won the Stefano Rodota Award of the Council of Europe for the paper “The Thin Red Line: Refocusing Data Protection Law on Automated-Decision-Making“, alongside her co-authors. Dr. Zanfir-Fortuna holds a PhD in Law with a thesis on the rights of the data subject under EU Data Protection Law, and an LLM in Human Rights (University of Craiova).

With our guest, here for a third time, we have gone through the logic of the Digital Omnibus package aiming to reform a cluster of important EU regulations, the “birth defects” of the AI Act, the importance of South Korea in the global data protection panorama, and the potential consequences of the recent CJEU case, Russmedia.

References:

* Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna at the Future of Privacy Forum

* Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna on LinkedIn

* Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna: A world tour of data protection laws (Masters of Privacy, April 2021)

* Data Protection vs. Privacy and Data Privacy: a January 28th conundrum (with Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna, Masters of Privacy - 2025)

* X v Russmedia Digital SRL (CJEU, December 2, 2025).

It is time to revisit Data Clean Rooms, having dedicated seven previous episodes to the topic across both the English and Spanish-language channels. The convergence of advanced data management techniques, more mature Privacy Enhancing Technologies, and sophisticated 1st-party data-based collaboration scenarios (on the back of AI, retail media, and Connected TV) already call for frequent updates. This is now accompanied by a more nuanced legal analysis that will benefit from the recent EDPS v. SRB (CJEU) case (on the relative nature of “personal data”).

Some common, burning questions that you will find answered in this episode: How do you apply Joint Controllership agreements to the various stages in common business cases? How to handle more complex relationships involving two or more parties?

References:

* Jacob Feder on LinkedIn

* Jacob Feder at Fieldfisher

* Peter Craddock: EDPS v SRB, the relative nature of personal data, processors, transparency, impact on MarTech and AdTech (Masters of Privacy, September 2025)

* Nicola Newitt (Infosum): the legal case for Data Clean Rooms (Masters of Privacy, March 2023)

* Matthias Eigenmann (Decentriq): Confidential Computing, contractual relationships and legal bases for Data Clean Rooms (Masters of Privacy, March 2024)

* Damien Desfontaines: Differential Privacy in Data Clean Rooms (Masters of Privacy, January 2024)

* Guidelines 8/2020 on the targeting of social media users

* Fashion ID GmbH & Co. KG v Verbraucherzentrale NRW (CJEU, 2019): The operator of a website that features a Facebook ‘Like’ button can be a controller jointly with Facebook in respect of the collection and transmission to Facebook of the personal data of visitors to its website.

* Digital Omnibus Regulation Proposal (EU Commission, November 19th 2025)

* Meta Platforms Inc and Others v Bundeskartellamt (CJEU, 2023)