Rob van Eijk
Former Dutch DPA · Senior Fellow, Future of Privacy Forum · Quoted in NYT, Bloomberg, POLITICO
Founder, Blaeu Privacy Response Team · LinkedIn · ORCID
Through Team Blaeu, I advise in-house legal and public affairs teams at Fortune 500 companies, law firms, and regulatory bodies on EU privacy and AI regulation, working solo or with specialist partners depending on the engagement. A PhD on Real Time Bidding and nine years at the Dutch DPA inform how the work gets done.
My recent work includes expert testimony in data protection proceedings, personal data qualification assessments under GDPR for multinational clients, and advising regulatory bodies on Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) as protective measures.
From regulatory strategy and enforcement defence to AI Act red-teaming — I work hands-on with clients across adtech, fintech, health data, and the public sector.
I translate how adtech auctions, AI models, and tracking systems actually work into language that holds up in court. Having spent nine years in an enforcement role at the Dutch DPA, I know what regulators look for and what they tend to miss.
Your risk classifications and technical documentation need to survive national authority scrutiny. I stress-test them the way an enforcer would, because I've been on that side of the table.
From GDPR personal data qualifications to AI Act governance frameworks, I shape compliance strategies based on direct experience with how European regulators investigate, decide, and enforce.
Fifteen years of hands-on experience inside regulatory institutions, international advisory boards, and enforcement proceedings.
What I find most rewarding is linking how policy experts see technology with how engineers describe it. My ambition is to help organizations build with the principles of transparency and purpose limitation in mind.
"As head of Private Sector Oversight at the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens), I enjoyed working with Rob for many years. He is analytically strong, thoughtful and very diplomatic. He has great knowledge at the intersection of privacy and technology and knows how to connect and relate these worlds like no other. His dissertation on Real Time Bidding is the exemplary example of this. Finally, but also very important, Rob is just an incredibly nice and pleasant colleague that I wish everyone on his team."
Udo Oelen
Former Head of Private Sector Oversight, Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens); Secretary of the Board, TNO
"I had the chance to work with Rob while I was at CNIL and we collaborated on several projects related to online tracking. Rob has a comprehensive view of the complex ecosystem that is the online advertising industry and also manages to know all the technical and legal details. Rob identifies the key challenges and successfully explains this highly complex topic to non-experts by providing useful examples. He can also design tools and write concise code to implement them."
Vincent Toubiana
Head of LINC (Digital Innovation Lab), CNIL — Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés
Selected engagements and media.
Panel moderation at CPDP 2026 on DMA Article 6(7) interoperability and OS-level privacy, examining the tension between forced openness and GDPR protections across Apple, Google, and other platforms.
Invited participation in the RegTech4AI expert workshop on Article 88b of the Omnibus proposal and a potential standardization mandate for automated privacy signals, covering GPC adoption and the policy boundary between targeting and attribution.
Expert participation in VUB Brussels Privacy Hub roundtable on DMA Article 6(11) and anonymisation, examining singling out as the central re-identification test and the risk of diverging standards between DMA and GDPR.
Panel at Privacy Symposium 2026 Venice on how confidential computing and trusted execution environments can reconcile cross-border data flows with data residency requirements and digital sovereignty frameworks.
Engagements start with a scoping call. Most matters on fixed fee or retainer.