I am a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Privacy Engineering and Policy-Aligned Systems (PEPSys) group of the 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.

Within the EXDIGIT project, I strengthen interdisciplinary research, with a focus on techno-legal research in the domain of privacy and data protection, evident e.g. by the public lecture series Privatheit in der digitalen Welt (privacy in a digital world). Moreover, we bring privacy engineering to other disciplines and domains, e.g. HCI perspectives on automotive driving (Demir et al. 2025). For further and always up-to-date information, visit my profiles on Google Scholar and LinkedIn.

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

Signature Publications:

Data Access

Leschke, N., Wolf, K., Pallas, F., 2026. Alohomora! Faciliating Personal Data Access Through Automated Graph Extraction and Integration. 2026 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW), pp. 56-64.

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.

Podda, E., Leschke, N., Samarati, P., Pallas, F., 2026. Transitioning from Portability in the GDPR to Access in the Data Act: A Multidisciplinary Analysis of Data Access by Design. Data Protection, Privacy and Artificial Intelligence, vol. 18, pp. 199-227.

Privacy Principles Beyond Data Access

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.

Leschke, N., Kurze, A., Reuter, C., Börner, A., Pallas, F, 2026. Offlinetags@CLT: Social Signals Meet Technical Communities (WIP). Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2026, Poster Proceedings.

Editor

Pallas, F., Leschke, N., Arastouei, N., Rannenberg, K, 2026. Privacy Technologies and Policy. 14th Annual Privacy Forum, APF 2026.

Awards

Conference Organization

  • Local Chair of GI Sicherheit 2027 (GI_Sicherheit)
  • Program Co-Chair for the Annual Privacy Forum 2026 (APF), together with Frank Pallas
  • Co-organizer of PET-con 2025.2 (PET-con)

Reviewing Activities

PC memberships only

  • IFIP Summer School on Privacy and Identity Management 2026 (IFIPSC)
  • 2026 International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE)
  • 2025 International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE)

Micro-CV

In 2024, I joined the PEPSys group at the 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 (especially “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”.