Frederike Kaltheuner

Frederike Kaltheuner is a leading expert on the intersection of emerging technology, policy, and rights. Frederike brings more than a decade of experience in tech policy, as well as in senior leaderhip positions, including as the inaugural Technology and Rights Director at Human Rights Watch, Special Adviser for the Vice-President of the European Commission, founding Director of the European AI and Society Fund, and Director for Corporate Exploitation at Privacy International, where she led the organisation’s work on corporate surveillance. Her team’s technical investigations into the murky world of online advertising have led to statutory inquiries by regulators, and caused some of the world’s most downloaded apps to change their practices.

As a policy expert on emerging technology Frederike has been invited to give expert evidence in the EU parliament, the House of Lords and the Belgian Federal Parliament. She regularly comments on emerging technologies in the international press and has given TV and radio interviews for AlJazeera, CNBC, BBC World News, BBC News, Tagesschau, Deutschlandfunk, WDR5 and BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, among others.

She is also the editor of Fake AI, a collection of essays on AI hype, pseudoscience, and snake oil. Her writing and commentary has appeared in The Guardian, Gizmodo, ZEIT Online and POLITICO Europe. Together with Nele Obermüller she wrote a book on data and justice (Nicolai Publishing, 2018, German).

In 2019, she was awarded The Coaching Fellowship for young women leaders of impact. She was also a 2016 Transatlantic Digital Fellow on cybersecurity and platform regulation with the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin and New America Foundation in D.C. Previously, she has worked with the Centre for Internet and Human Rights, hosted the pilot for a TV show on German national TV and was a contributing writer for the French-German Philosophie Magazin.

Frederike holds an MSc in Internet Science from the University of Oxford and a BA in Liberal Arts with a focus on Philosophy and Politics from the University College Maastricht. She was a 2016 research associate with the DATACTIVE collective at the University of Amsterdam and a 2010-2011 visiting student at the philosophy department of Bogaziçi University in Istanbul. From 2008-2013, she received a scholarship from the German National Merit Foundation.