Towards data traceability for EU digital rights protection

Contemporary digital environments are marked by an ever-greater flow of information including personal data. However, shortcomings in provenance and traceability mechanisms have long remained a challenge for data governance. This has implications for the protection of individual rights under European digital regulations, especially the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. Drawing on the findings of an ongoing research project at UiT - The Arctic University of Norway on data traceability, the lecture (a) argues that effective compliance with various legal requirements demands stronger data provenance; (b) shows that end-to-end data provenance mechanisms are lacking in practice; and (c) proposes a potential approach to mitigate that gap in the context of GDPR compliance. It concludes that data provenance is a broader sociotechnical issue that requires attention to both a complex network of actors who are involved in the continuous generation of data across organizational and territorial boundaries, as well as to political values embedded in digital infrastructures.

Speaker 

Dr Samar Abbas Nawaz is a visiting researcher at University of Edinburgh’s School of Law and is employed as a researcher at UiT - The Arctic University of Norway. He is working on a project funded by the Research Council of Norway to develop data traceability solution for GDPR compliance. In 2025, Nawaz defended his PhD on 'Safe Integration of Civil Drones: Law, Self-Operation and Infrastructure' while affiliated with the University of Oslo and Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).

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