I am a research associate and PhD candidate at the Privacy Engineering and Policy-Aligned Systems (PEPSys) group of Paris Lodron University of Salzburg. My research expertise is in the field of privacy engineering, with a focus on personal data access and data portability. To turn the unused concept of data access into a valuable source of information, I explore different steps of the user journey and build technical systems that remove barriers hindering users from exercising their access rights. In particular, this includes the following challenges and approaches:

  • Obstructive request processes, tackled by employing means of web automation.
  • Heterogeneous data representation, unified through graph inference methods.
  • Missing interoperability, addressed by techniques of data integration, specifically schema matching.

In 2024, I joined the PEPSys group at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg’s faculty for Digital and Analytical Sciences. Previously, I worked as a research associate at the Information Systems Engineering department of TU Berlin. Within my work at TU Berlin, I discovered my passion for privacy engineering in the context of the DaSKITA project, which was focused on legally compliant and user-friendly design of transparency and data access rights. Moreover, I was involved in teaching at bachelor and master level (esp. “Information Governance” and “Cloud Native Architecture and Engineering”). In 2022 I completed my studies of Information Systems Management at TU Berlin with a master thesis on “Privacy Preserving Automated Schema Matching in a Distributed Setting”. For further and always up-to-date information, visit my profiles on Google Scholar and LinkedIn.

Contact me at nicola.leschke@plus.ac.at

List of Publications

Leschke, N., Pöhn, D., Pallas, F., 2024. How to Drill into Silos: Creating a Free-to-Use Dataset of Data Subject Access Packages. Privacy Technologies and Policy. APF 2024, pp. 132-155.

Leschke, N., Kirsten, F., Pallas, F., Grünewald, E., 2023. Streamlining Personal Data Access Requests: From Obstructive Procedures to Automated Web Workflows. Web Engineering. ICWE 2023, pp. 111-125.

Gebauer, M., Maschhur, F., Leschke, N., Grünewald, E., Pallas, F., 2023. A ‘Human-in-the-Loop’ Approach for Information Extraction from Privacy Policies under Data Scarcity. 2023 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW), pp. 76-83.

Grünewald, E., Halkenhäußer, J., Leschke, N., Washington, J., Paupini, C., Pallas, F., 2023. Enabling Versatile Privacy Interfaces Using Machine-Readable Transparency Information. Privacy Symposium 2023, pp. 119-137.

Grünewald, E., Halkenhäußer, J., Leschke, N., Pallas, F., 2023. Towards Cross-Provider Analysis of Transparency Information for Data Protection.