FIZ Karlsruhe at the CPDP 2026: data privacy, AI, and cybersecurity in focus

The FIZ team—comprising Stephanie von Maltzan, LLM, Dr. Oliver Vettermann, Thilo Gottschalk, and Professor Dr. Franziska Boehm—was once again represented in various roles at the CPDP this year. Together, they organized the IT Security Track, a workshop on crisis simulation in the event of cyberattacks, and a panel discussion on the Law Enforcement Directive.

The panel discussion on the Law Enforcement Directive examined current case law and existing areas of tension—particularly in connection with AI-supported law enforcement practices. The workshop “Ransom, Crisis Management and Sovereignty: An EU Governance Crisis Simulation,” on the other hand, placed participants in an interactive crisis scenario whose course and outcome depended largely on their decisions.

In addition, Stephanie von Maltzan delivered a presentation titled “Distributed Memory, Unlearning, and the Governance of Forgetting in Large Language Models under the GDPR.” In it, she explained why the right to erasure is difficult to enforce in large language models: simply blocking problematic responses is not enough—what matters far more is whether a model can actually “forget” information in a reliable and verifiable manner.

Dr. Felix Bieker, LLM, who will join the FIZ team on June 1, organized a panel on the Digital Omnibus as part of his current project, DatenTRAFO. Representatives from academia, civil society, and regulatory authorities discussed the European Commission’s deregulation approach and the question of how to ensure the protection of constitutional rights in this context.