Digital Legacy Beyond GDPR: Succession, Data Protection, Access Rights, and Platform Power – Workshop

We will be helping to facilitate a workshop at CPDP Conference on the 21st May at Le Baixu between 14:15 – 15:30. This workshop builds upon The European Law Institute’s ‘Model Rules on Succession of Digital Assets, Data and other Digital Remains’ scope of work.

Dr Edina Harbinja, Birmingham Law School, Associate Professor in Law
Teresa Rodríguez de las Heras Ballell, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (and the European Law Institute President) – Spain
James Norris, Digital Legacy Association (DLA) – UK
Régis Chatellier, CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés – French Data Protection Authority) – France
Elwira Macierzyńska Kozminski University (also practicing lawyer at Lotus Kancelaria) – Poland

Workshop overview

As digital lives become digital estates, who governs the data, assets, and identities we leave behind? This interactive workshop explores post-mortem governance at the crossroads of succession law, GDPR, platform contracts, and generative AI. Using the European Law Institute’s Model Rules on Succession to Digital Remains as a catalyst, the session includes short expert provocations, live audience polling, and a reflective exercise (“From Law to Self”) that invites participants to apply legal principles to their own digital lives.

The workshop’s objectives are to:

clarify the distinction between digital assets and personal digital remains
test the limits of platform terms versus succession and public policy
explore GDPR-coherent access models that protect third parties
assess cross-border solutions that ensure predictable enforcement

By combining expert insight with participant engagement, the session aims to humanise digital legacy governance and generate concrete regulatory insights for policymakers, regulators, practitioners, and scholars.

The workshop’s organising institution is The University of Birmingham.

About CPDP

CPDP (“Computers, Privacy and Data Protection”) is a non-profit platform founded in 2007 by research groups at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Université de Namur, and Tilburg University, later joined by INRIA and the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research.

Today, CPDP is carried by 20 academic centres of excellence from the EU, the US, and beyond. Based in Brussels, CPDP has become a world-leading multidisciplinary conference, convening a global community across research, policy, practice, civil society, and technology to engage with cutting-edge developments in privacy and data protection.

This year’s conference takes place between the 19th-22nd May in Brussels, Belgium.

If you are attending the conference please do come along to the workshop if it is of interest. If you would like to meet-up for a coffee pre or post workshop, please do get in touch