Biography
Anna Colaps is a highly specialised EU privacy and digital policies professional.
She has worked as Member of Cabinet at the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), advising the Head of the Institution, managing high-level relationships and representing the EDPS with external stakeholders. Her work has contributed meaningfully to the advancement of EU priorities.
Colaps holds a PhD in European Law, with a pioneering thesis on the interplay between competition and privacy laws. At the University of Naples, she has worked as a PhD lecturer and researcher, lecturing on EU law and managing research projects on behalf of the Law Department.
She is also affiliated as Lecturer at the Université de Liege, and as a Researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
As a PhD Scholar (2013-2016), Colaps has investigated the meaning of privacy for competition policy and its enforcement. In particular, whether a violation of privacy, or degradation of data protection, could amount to abuses of dominance or other prohibited practices under competition law. In her capacity as EU public servant (2016 onwards), she contributed to the establishment of the first-ever-network of authorities working in the digital field, i.e. competition, consumer data protection, media regulation, child protection, from the EU and beyond, with the aim of achieving a coherent enforcement of laws (EDPS Digital Clearinghouse). Furthermore, she advised on EU legislation which finally recognised the relevance of protecting data and privacy also in market regulation and digital services regulation tools.
As a Visiting Fellow at the Florence STG, Anna Colaps will explore both the theoretical and concrete possibilities to pursue a form of "governance altruism" in the enforcement of EU digital regulations, so that individuals, markets and public enforcers may be better off.