Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna: GDPR changes, AI Act hangover, Russmedia

Dr. Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna is a globally recognized data protection law expert, with 15 years of experience in the field split between Europe and the U.S., spanning academia, public service, consulting and policy. She currently is Vice President for Global Privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, a global non-profit headquartered in Washington DC, coordinating FPF’s offices and partners in Brussels, Tel Aviv, Singapore, Nairobi, and New Delhi, and leading the work on global privacy and data protection developments related to new technologies, including AI. She is also a founding Advisory Board Member of Women in AI Governance, and an affiliated researcher to the LSTS Center of Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Dr. Zanfir-Fortuna worked for the European Data Protection Supervisor and is a member of the Reference Panel of the Global Privacy Assembly – the international organization reuniting data protection authorities around the world, as well as a member of the T20 engagement group of the G20 under Brazil’s Presidency in 2024.

She was elected to be part of the Executive Committee of ACM’s Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FaccT) Conference (2021-2022). Her scholarship on the GDPR is referenced by the Court of Justice of the EU, and in 2023 she won the Stefano Rodota Award of the Council of Europe for the paper “The Thin Red Line: Refocusing Data Protection Law on Automated-Decision-Making“, alongside her co-authors. Dr. Zanfir-Fortuna holds a PhD in Law with a thesis on the rights of the data subject under EU Data Protection Law, and an LLM in Human Rights (University of Craiova).

With our guest, here for a third time, we have gone through the logic of the Digital Omnibus package aiming to reform a cluster of important EU regulations, the “birth defects” of the AI Act, the importance of South Korea in the global data protection panorama, and the potential consequences of the recent CJEU case, Russmedia.

References:

* Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna at the Future of Privacy Forum

* Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna on LinkedIn

* Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna: A world tour of data protection laws (Masters of Privacy, April 2021)

* Data Protection vs. Privacy and Data Privacy: a January 28th conundrum (with Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna, Masters of Privacy - 2025)

* X v Russmedia Digital SRL (CJEU, December 2, 2025).

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mastersofprivacy.com/subscribe