On 19–20 June 2025, researchers and practitioners gathered at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) for the annual working group meeting of @COST Action Grassroots of Digital Europe (costgrade.eu).

Working Group 2 was dedicated to advancing our forthcoming White Paper on online privacy, due this fall. This collaborative effort explores how grassroots digital movements can shape a more just and participatory approach to online privacy in Europe.

Jernej Kaluža, from the Faculty of Social Sciences, is the Online Privacy Task-Group Leader and has been working on this topic since last year together with Ivo Furman and Marya Šupa. Since then, the project has grown into a true collective effort involving many dedicated colleagues. Together, they are working to show why grassroots communities of digital computing are crucial for safeguarding online privacy — not only as an individual right but as a shared social and institutional commitment.

The group has been exploring how issues like algorithmic personalisation, digital capitalism, and digital colonialism shape the ways in which our data is governed, used, and sometimes exploited. One of the most pressing challenges they face is understanding how rapid developments in AI technologies affect online privacy, and how we might rethink the right to privacy in this evolving landscape.

A key part of this project is to map communities of digital computing across Europe that actively work to strengthen online privacy from the ground up. The goal is to produce a White Paper that will not only help policymakers make informed, forward-looking decisions but also serve the broader public as a practical guide to the ethical, technological, and grassroots dimensions of online privacy.

🔍 Highlights from WG2 presentations in Leiden included:

• Regina Seiwald & Carlos Cunha: Digital Rights from the Ground Up — examining European grassroots privacy initiatives that resist surveillance capitalism and build alternative digital infrastructures.
• Sašo Josimovski & Lidija Pulevska: Ethics and Technological Innovation in Grassroots Privacy Movements.
• Ivo Furman: Forgetting by Design: Machine Unlearning and the Future of Data Privacy — investigating how “machine unlearning” could operationalize the right to be forgotten in the age of AI.
• Sandra Becker: Privacy Issues as a Wikipedia Contributor — discussing the challenges of privacy and inclusion in open knowledge communities, especially for women and minorities.

💡 We also hosted a lively CryptoParty, led by Jurij Smrke, which sparked a discussion on shadow libraries and alternative models of knowledge sharing.

Together, the working-group members reflected on the White Paper’s structure, agreed on new sections, and refined their message: privacy is not just an individual right — it is a collective, participatory practice that EU policymakers must take seriously.