Creating an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda to Study the Effects of Online Privacy Regulation (25w2028)

The Banff International Research Station will host the "Creating an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda to Study the Effects of Online Privacy Regulation" workshop in Banff from October 10 - 12, 2025.

Privacy has taken the world by storm: every week there are new articles in the popular media about new data breaches, invasive data collection behaviors, and other privacy snafus. In response, governments around the world have been quick to pass new privacy legislation to better protect consumers and offer transparency into online data collection practices. And yet, study after study has shown that many of these laws are simply being ignored, by both those required to follow them, as well as those required to enforce them. A few research papers have shown possible reasons for this non-compliance: developers do not understand their obligations, regulators do not have the tools needed to facilitate investigations and enforce compliance, and consumers do not understand their rights; there is little transparency into data practices. As a result, due to the lack of interdisciplinary research aimed at understanding how to fix these problems, consumers are continually exposed to disagreeable (and often illegal) data collection practices.

This workshop gathers together internationally-recognized experts in computer science and law who study the effects of privacy regulations on software (and on the consumers who use that software). Our goal is to share novel insights to collaboratively create a long-term interdisciplinary research agenda aimed at solving this problem. This will include identifying grand challenges, sharing novel research methodologies, and planning future collaborations. The output of this workshop will be a research agenda that will evoke deep insights into why privacy regulations fail to be followed, how to better communicate legal requirements to software developers, how to study privacy compliance, and how to more effectively enforce privacy regulations.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology.