#PrivacyCamp26: Call for sessions

Privacy Camp hosts its 14th edition on 13 October 2026, in Brussels and online. For people living in Europe and across the globe, the impact technology has on our lives becomes ever more acute, ever more heavy and impossible to deny. Digital technologies shape how people work, organise, communicate, access services, cross borders, learn, create and resist. They can support community power and collective care. They can also deepen surveillance, extraction, discrimination, militarisation and environmental harm.

By EDRi · July 16, 2026

“The Origins of Future Technologies: Towards communities of digital self-determination”

Summary

Privacy Camp hosts its 14th edition on 13 October 2026, in Brussels and online. For people living in Europe and across the globe, the impact technology has on our lives becomes ever more acute, ever more heavy and impossible to deny. Digital technologies shape how people work, organise, communicate, access services, cross borders, learn, create and resist. They can support community power and collective care. They can also deepen surveillance, extraction, discrimination, militarisation and environmental harm.

This year’s theme asks where technologies come from, who gets to shape them, and what conditions make digital self-determination possible. It starts from a simple premise: digital futures do not appear from nowhere. They are built through land, labour, capital, infrastructure, law, public money, political choices and social struggle.

The horizons of technological advancement, trade and rights are being reshaped in the context of Russia’s full scale invasion in Ukraine, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, ongoing apartheid, ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine and war in Lebanon and the broader region, the United States’ attack on Iran and China’s threats in Taiwan. Technology is being used to experiment, target and kill people in war. At the same time, digital infrastructure has become central to trade pressure, resource extraction, military cooperation and economic coercion.

In Europe, political leaders are grappling with EU-US geopolitical tensions, trade talks with China, Russian threats and the normalisation of far-right politics in national and European institutions. Defence, security and military spending have substantially increased, while public services, climate protections, labour rights and civic space are being hollowed out.

In 2026 and against this bleak background, the EU launched the Tech Sovereignty Package. This package is focused on semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and cloud infrastructure (including data centers). Unfortunately, the legal rules created to protect our rights are considered to be a barrier to the EU’s “competitiveness” and, as such, “sovereignty.” This is visible in the wider EU deregulatory agenda, including the Digital Omnibus, the AI Omnibus, and reforms affecting data protection, privacy, labour and environmental safeguards.

Sovereign technology should serve people, planet, and democracy. It should strengthen our collective ability to define the digital future we want to live in. But what does digital self-determination look like? What conditions would allow communities, as a meaningful framework, to discuss the preconditions in which we can resource, innovate and regulate technologies of empowerment, without recreating dependency, extraction and harm.

As we discuss moving beyond dependencies, towards self-determined digital futures we must ask: where does technology actually come from? Who builds and sustains it? Where does power lie? And ultimately, whose version of “sovereignty” is discussed in the current European public debate?

Who and what are the forces, drivers and materialities that enable today’s technologies? What can we learn from investigations into the supply chain of current technologies and infrastructures, such as Artificial Intelligence? How can we think of the future by applying the lessons of the past? What tensions and antagonisms emerge if the notion of “sovereignty” as understood in the EU debate is challenged? What examples of communities who show digital self-determination can inspire EU’s so called digital sovereignty debate? What tensions emerge when EU ‘digital sovereignty’ is challenged from the perspective of communities, workers, migrants, racialised people, occupied peoples, climate justice movements and the Global South?

In 2026, we invite proposals for sessions that investigate “The Origins of Future Technologies: Towards communities of digital self-determination” by touching on a set of areas.

Material conditions in the Production of Technologies

  • Natural resources needed across the supply chain: what are the natural resources needed for building technologies such as AI? What role to they have in securing critical components, such as semiconductors, or watering critical parts of the supply chain such as data centers? How do GDPR, ePrivacy and AI Act safeguards shape the material conditions of AI, from data extraction and biometric processing to data centres, labour and public infrastructure?
  • Labour conditions: who mines the critical materials needed for the production of technology? What union busting practices exist across the tech supply chain? What can tech workers, unions, migrant justice groups, climate movements and digital rights organisations build together? What coalitions are being forged or need to be forged on the ground?
  • Capital: what are the venture capital forces driving the current AI hype, consolidating through defence, security and militarisation? How are the evolving business models influencing technological directions?

Political vision in the Use of Technologies

  • Military use: how does militarisation and securitisation impact the EU deregulation debate?
  • Political ideologies: what political ideologies drive the development of technology? What does digital self-determination mean for communities facing racialised discrimination, surveillance, occupation, border violence, workplace control or environmental harm?

Moving (Technologies) forward through communities

  • Community innovation for digital self-determination: distributed and self-hosted models of data storage, AI built by and for community needs; What examples of community-led, self-hosted, public or cooperative digital infrastructure can challenge dominant models of digital sovereignty?
  • Law, deregulation and rights: resisting the Digital Omnibus (specifically the ‘Data Omnibus’), defending GDPR and ePrivacy safeguards, protecting access, transparency and automated decision-making rights, enforcing existing digital laws, supporting collective litigation, and challenging the idea that rights are obstacles to EU competitiveness. If digital self-determination requires the power to refuse, what happens when GDPR and ePrivacy reforms make refusal of tracking, profiling and secondary data use harder in practice?
  • Building power through connecting grassroots movements, from tech workers organising for Palestine, to labour, migrant, lgbtqia+, climate, economic justice and landback movements: what is needed by the digital rights field in this moment to support and strengthen transnational and cross-solidarity work?

Session formats

We particularly encourage proposals for interactive workshops — formats that foster small-group work, peer exchange, and collaboration across sectors, coalitions and disciplines. Workshops are a space to share practices, brainstorm and experiment together, moving from talk to strategic action.

While our preference for this year are proposals for workshops, we also welcome proposals for panel discussions, especially those that centre diverse voices and grounded lived experience, and which leave space for meaningful audience engagement.

Submission guidelines:

  • Indicate a clear objective for your session, i.e. what would be a good outcome for you?
  • Make it as interactive as possible and encourage audience participation
  • Support diversity of voices among panelists and strive for multiple perspectives.
  • Note that the average session length is 50 minutes.
  • Please propose a format that is suitable for your proposal (e.g. do not fit a panel idea into a workshop and vice versa). For workshops, we will provide additional guidance, support and feedback.

For workshop proposals: workshops can employ different forms, tools and use of materials to ensure that participants connect with each other, and for the session to be interactive and inclusive. Ensure that the workshop’s objectives are clear, including how you will structure and facilitate the workshop. Ensure participants get to work with each other in small groups towards a specific relevant goal.

For panel proposals: include a list of a maximum 4 speakers that could participate in your panel. Ensure you cover academia, civil society and decision–makers’ perspectives. Let us know which speaker(s) has/have already confirmed participation, at least in principle.

To submit a proposal, please fill in this form by 10 August 2026, 09.00 AM CEST.

Timeline

The Privacy Camp Content Committee will review submissions and will notify you about the outcome of the selection procedure before 21 August 2026. Please note that we expect you to confirm you would like to proceed with organising your panel by 25 August. On 4 September 2026 we will publish a draft programme. We will publish the final programme on 28 September.

If your session is approved on 21 August

We encourage those with organisational support to cover their own expense. Where there is necessary we can reimburse up to 400 EUR for each speaker/session organiser, for both transport to and accommodation in Brussels. Speakers will be responsible for making their own travel and accommodation arrangements, and reimbursement will be provided upon submission of the relevant invoices and/or travel tickets. You will receive further details on how to proceed about this reimbursement process.

At the latest, speakers should be confirmed on 10 September, together with the final description of your session. The sooner you confirm your speakers, the more chances you have their transport / accommodation fit the reimbursement budget. Note that if you wait until the 10 September deadline, chances increase that the 400 EUR budget will not be sufficient to cover for transport and accommodation costs of your speakers. We can unfortunately not cover expenses beyond this budget.

About Privacy Camp

Privacy Camp is organised by European Digital Rights (EDRi), in collaboration with its partners the Research Group on Law, Science, Technology & Society (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Privacy Salon vzw, the Institute for European Studies (IEE) at Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles and Racism and Technology Center.

Privacy Camp 2026 will take place on Tuesday, 13 October 2026 in a hybrid format (in Brussels, with online broadcast). Participation is free and registrations are open: be an early bird and sign up today!

In 2026, Privacy Camp’s Content Committee comprises of Andreea Belu (EDRi), Gloria González Fuster (LSTS, VUB), Jill Toh (Racism and Technology Center), Sanne Stevens (Justice, Equity and Technology Project) and Alexandra Giannopoulou (DFF).

For inquiries about the programme please contact Andreea Belu at . For inquiries about the venue and reimbursements, please contact Guillermo Peris at .