Legal Frameworks vs. Technological Realities

As digital technologies evolve at an unprecedented pace, legal and regulatory frameworks often struggle to keep up, creating tensions between promoting innovation, security demand, and safeguarding privacy and other fundamental rights. A key challenge lies in regulatory enforcement, which often faces structural limitations such as jurisdictional constraints, institutional capacity gaps, and the technical complexity of emerging technologies. Even the most thoughtfully designed privacy and security regulations often fall short due to weak enforcement mechanisms, inconsistent application, and insufficient penalties to ensure compliance.

This interdisciplinary project seeks to address these challenges by exploring the dynamic relationship between legal frameworks, regulatory strategies, and technology development. Using comparative legal analysis, case studies, and other empirical research, this project will identify governance models that effectively balance security imperatives with privacy protections across different jurisdictions and technological contexts. It will also propose practical enforcement
strategies to bridge the gap between regulatory aspirations and real-world constraints and outcomes, offering innovative approaches to compliance monitoring in an era where traditional methods are increasingly inadequate.

Nikolaus Forgó – Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law, University of Vienna

Martina Lindorfer – Faculty of Computer Science, TU Wien

Barbara Prainsack – Department of Political Science, University of Vienna