Do you want to learn more about personal data and GDPR?

Given the digital technologies’ encroachment into our lives, the right to privacy and the protection of personal data have become crucial to both individuals, communities and businesses. In this elective course you will be taken to the core of this current issue.

– By the end of the course, students will have a thorough knowledge of the norms that govern the processing of personal data with the view of protecting the privacy of individuals whose data is being processed, associate professor Malgorzata Cyndecka says.

Cyndecka works with data protection issues, including the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and she is the course leader of the newly established elective course in Privacy and Data protection - GDPR. 

Personal data and privacy under pressure

– The protection of our privacy and personal data has never been so critical as it is nowadays. Our personal data is of a great value to both companies, organisations and public authorities. The tech giants may profit from profiling us and selling our data to other companies while the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how millions of Facebook users’ personal data was harvested and misused for political advertising. Thus, knowing the principles governing privacy and data protection has become vital. During this course students  will learn about the legal grounds for processing personal data, including sensitive types of such data, special considerations regarding the processing of personal data of children, data protection rules applicable in the context of employment, exceptions concerning academic, journalistic and research activities, and requirements concerning transfers of personal data to third countries, that it outside EU/EEA.

By the end of this course, the students will be able to apply the principles and rules governing the protection of personal data to the already existing and emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence or facial recognition, different situations in which one processes personal data such as camera surveillance at work or targeting of social media users, and to global and unexpected challenges such as the COVID-19 outbreak and using contact tracing tools in response to the pandemic, Cyndecka says.

The course is recommended to all students who are interested in digital economy and digitalization of both public and private sector, innovation, human rights, democracy as well as the impact of privacy regulations on other fields. 

The students will learn how to correctly balance the right to data protection, with other rights, freedoms and interests. This is important given the two-fold aim of the GDPR, that is the protection of personal data and contributing to the accomplishment of the EU/EEA internal market. Being familiar with data protection regulations, both national and international, is crucial also because they influence other fields of law such as administrative law, EU/EEA competition law, public procurement, intellectual property law, health law or labour law.

Project based course

Unlike all other courses offered at the Law Faculty, this course is project-based. All students will be assigned to groups of maximum six students representing different nationalities.

Every student group will work on a project that will be based on a real case/project provided by one of our external partners, such as Media City Bergen. The students are expected to identify potential data protection issues that are raised by for example using a new mobile application, and propose how to address those issues under the relevant data protection regulations. In addition to traditional lectures held by both academics and lawyers working with privacy issues, the students will be offered seminars and supervision during their work with the projects.