ESRs Fatma Dogan and Soumia El Mestari at Privacy Symposium 2023

ESRs Fatma Dogan and Soumia El Mestari attended the annual Privacy Symposium took place in Venice between 17-21 April. ESRs presented their paper which they have witten with Dr. Maria Botes from Centre for Medical Ethics and Law of Stellenbosch University.

Their paper titled “Technical and Legal Aspects Relating to the (Re-Use of Health Data when Repurposing Machine Learning Models in the EU” will be published in the conference book. In the study, they discussed technologies such as re-purposing machine learning models under EU data protection laws. The original point was that technologies like Al and loT are data greedy by their nature hence they need more datasets constanty. Machine learning technologies can reuse the existing machine learning models, also known as “knowledge transfer for other tasks”. However, this solution when examined under a legal lens becomes ambiguous because there is no exact equivalent of this term in current EU data protection laws. Even so, when this technology is used in health data tasks, the practice becomes even more complex. because health data qualifies as sensitive data which attracts stricter rules regarding its processing.

In the paper, they examined this topic from both a legal and a technical point of view. Their research considers the use of repurposing machine learning models and their application within the legal context of the secondary use and re-use of personal data. Their legal analysis includes the General Data Protection Regulation, Data Governance Act, and European Health Data Space proposal. The ESRs received questions and supportive feedback from the participants and also attended the
other enriching panels of the conference.