‘Privacy is a question of defending your power, or your powerlessness’, wrote the Swedish author and politician Kerstin Anér in 1979. The question of power has animated privacy and data protection debates for decades, shaping and driving it in many directions: from power asymmetry and power imbalances to individual empowerment, from informational and data power to market power. How relevant is the notion of power in current approaches to data protection? What does it stand for? How can it help us better understand the role of data protection in democratic societies? And how can data protection – including collective data protection practices - shape our understanding of power?

This agora will open these questions and invite participants to engage in the discussion, with the aim of powering up contemporary data protection thinking.