Bert Jaap Koops

Professor of regulation & technology, Tilburg University

http://rechten.uvt.nl/koops/files/page.asp

Biography

Prof.dr. Bert-Jaap Koops is Professor of Regulation & Technology at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT), the Netherlands. From 2005-2010, he was a member of De Jonge Akademie, a young-researcher branch of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His main research field is law & technology, in particular criminal-law issues such as cybercrime, cyber-investigation powers, and DNA forensics. He is also interested in other topics of technology regulation, including privacy, data protection, identity, digital constitutional rights, 'code as law', human enhancement, and regulation of bio- and nanotechnologies. From 2004-2009, he co-ordinated a VIDI research program on law, technology, and shifting power relations.
Koops studied mathematics and general and comparative literature at Groningen University, and received his PhD in law at Tilburg University in 1999. He has published extensively in English and Dutch on a wide variety of topics. Koops' WWW Crypto Law Survey is a standard publication on crypto regulation of worldwide renown. 

Presentation: The right to be forgotten in Utopia and in practice

The so-called "right to be forgotten" has been put firmly on the agenda, both of academia and of policy. Although the idea is intuitive and appealing, the legal form and practical implications of a right to be forgotten have yet to take shape. What does it mean to "be forgotten" and what kind of "right" is this? This presentations puts the right to be forgotten in the socio-technical context of Big Data, in which massive data collections are created and mined for many purposes. This provides particular challenges for the right to be forgotten. Against whom can the right be invoked? When and why can the right be invoked? How can the right be effected? Considerable obstacles have to be overcome, if people are really to be enabled to "be forgotten".