Legal activist Max Schrems will speak at Trinity College in Dublin next week.

Trinity College Law Review and the Trinity Law Society will host a panel discussion on “Fighting for Privacy Rights in the Age of Social Media”, in association with Arthur Cox and Eversheds Sutherland, featuring the Austrian law student who took on Facebook in a legal action.

Schrems is the founder of the European Centre for Digital Rights and took a successful legal action against Facebook and the Safe Harbour Agreement in 2015 in relation to mass surveillance of data between the EU and the US.

The event will take place at 7pm on 23 September at the Graduates Memorial Building.

The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session and will examine the current state of privacy rights protection in the world, how social media has eroded those protections and how privacy rights could be vindicated in the future. 

Data collected

Schrems will be joined by Professor David Carroll, who initiated the first case against Cambridge-Analytica, as seen in the Netflix documentary The Great Hack, in an attempt to obtain the data collected on him.

Ravi Naik, the solicitor who took this case, will accompany him.

Naik was awarded the UK Human Rights Lawyer of the Year for his work on that case. 

This event will form part of Trinity College Law Review’s Distinguished Speaker Series, a bi-annual lecture series that seeks to promote academic discourse between students and legal experts. 

Panellists will also receive the Trinity Praeses Elit Award as a recognition of their outstanding contribution to society.

Advanced discourse

“The Trinity Praeses Elit Award is awarded to individuals who have advanced discourse in their line of work, and who have been a source of inspiration for young people everywhere,” says Milly Farrell Kelly, auditor of the Trinity Law Society.

The Trinity Praeses Elit Award was founded by Mary Robinson, former auditor of the Law Society who went on to become President of Ireland.

The Trinity College Law Review Distinguished Speaker Series began in 2006 and previous speakers include David Bruck (2018), Cass Sunstein (2017), Gina Miller (2017) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2007).