Workshop: Anonymisation at the Crossroads of EU Digital Regulations

Workshop on anonymisation and data regulation, highlighting preliminary EC findings against Alphabet on Article 6(11) DMA compliance.

This workshop will examine the growing centrality of anonymisation in EU digital regulation, with particular focus on the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Recent enforcement developments , most notably the European Commission's preliminary findings on the sharing of search data, confirm that anonymisation and re-identification risk now lie at the heart of the policy debate.

The workshop's first objective is to understand how the Commission seeks to combine technical and contractual controls, why it appears to favour a heuristics-based approach over established anonymisation models such as k-anonymity, and what alternative approaches could offer in terms of privacy guarantees and utility preservation.

The discussion will then situate these developments within the broader regulatory context of the proposed Digital Omnibus package, which includes amendments to the definition of personal data and, through Article 41a, seeks to recalibrate the institutional balance between the Commission and the European Data Protection Board (EDPB).

Against this backdrop, the workshop asks whether the EU is witnessing the emergence of a new governance model for anonymisation, one shaped less by horizontal instruments than by sector-specific measures. Workshop participants will discuss the implications of these trends for privacy protection and regulatory coherence across the Union.