Data protection, privacy and artificial intelligence, volume 18: The world is watching

This book presents insights from the 2025 CPDP.ai international conference, where leading scholars, policy makers, and practitioners examine how Europe's fast-evolving digital frameworks shape global debates. As the EU legislates at unprecedented speed, it not only regulates technologies such as AI, but also defines their governance through rights-based instruments including the AI Act, the Data Act, and the GDPR.

The chapters analyse the consolidation of the EU model of AI and data governance, covering topics such as Fundamental Rights Impact Assessments, proportionality, transparency obligations for companion chatbots, and transatlantic contrasts in AI and health-data regulation. Contributors explore how divergent legal traditions influence accountability and democratic oversight, and how emerging duties-such as the duty of loyalty in data processing-could rebalance power between citizens and infrastructures. Other chapters address data access under the Data Act, empirical supervision of algorithmic profiling, and proposals to strengthen GDPR enforcement.

Opening with The World Is Watching, an artistic and philosophical reflection on perception, opacity, and the more-than-human in surveillance societies, the book bridges critical theory and regulatory practice. A dedicated Practitioners' Corner connects real-world governance experience with academic insight, highlighting pressing challenges for the year ahead.

Uniting law, technology, and ethics, this interdisciplinary volume captures Europe's effort to govern AI and data infrastructures-under the close gaze of a watching world.