This empirical project aims to analyse the roles of PETs, from both legal and regulatory perspectives, in protecting fundamental rights and freedoms, such as data protection and privacy.

The project assesses the laws relevant to PETs and fundamental rights and freedoms in the UK, and more broadly Europe, to explore how PETs can be used to support compliance with data protection laws like the GDPR (e.g. data protection by design, anonymisation, pseudonymisation, security and data minimisation) and help data subjects exercise their rights (e.g. data portability, transparency, consent/consent management and access). The project will be scoped out during its initial phase with close stakeholder engagement to delimit its coverage when it comes to specific data privacy issues and contexts.

The project also surveys relevant regulatory and policy developments in the UK, Europe and other jurisdictions like the USA and undertakes ground-breaking empirical work, involving stakeholders like regulators, policy-makers and industry, to generate fresh thinking about the roles of PETs and other regulatory interventions in safeguarding people’s fundamental rights and freedoms.

A short presentation of the LAWREG project is available for download.