Ivan Szekely

His professional interests turned to the topics of publicity and secrecy in the early 1980s; as a freelance intellectual, he wrote studies and participated in research.

Between 1991 and 2007, he contributed to the establishment and work of the Department of Social Informatics of the Faculty of Natural and Social Sciences (TTtK) at the Budapest University of Technology (BME), and then its successor, the Department of Information and Knowledge Management of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences (GTK). In 1995, he obtained a doctorate in information management; then in 1999, he became a candidate of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In addition to his teaching activities, he was a founding senior fellow of the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner between 1995 and 1998.

Since December 1998, he has been the Chief Advisor and then Research Professor of the Open Society Archive of the Central European University (CEU). Since 2007, he has been an Associate Professor at the Department of Electronics Technology of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics (VIK) of the Budapest University of Technology (BME), and one of the developers of the Master's degree in Business Informatics.
At various times, he developed and taught new courses at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest Metropolitan University (METU), the University of Szeged (SZTE), and the University of Miskolc (ME).

He is a participant in international research groups and projects on the topics of privacy and identity management, freedom of information, data protection awareness, ethical issues of the use of new and future technologies, the functioning of surveillance societies, theoretical and practical aspects of surveillance and resilience. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) conference series.
His research areas: data protection and freedom of information, remembering and forgetting, surveillance, privacy-enhancing technologies, resilience, identity, archival science.
He led the first data sensitivity assessment in Hungary and the region in 1989-1990. He is the originator of data protection due diligence in Hungary and the initiator of internal data protection officer training.
He has written about 80 major research and expert papers and over 100 major publications, including monographs. He is a regular speaker at professional conferences; he has presented at about 200 professional events, including 100 international conferences and seminars.

Co-author of the National Information Strategy (1995), the government strategic theses Society and infocommunication (1999–2000). Participant in the National Information and Communication Council's (NHIT) Information Society Technological Perspectives project (2005), founding member of the editorial board of the journal Information Society (2001–).

In 2004, he received the Positive e-Privacy Award from civil organizations for his outstanding role in creating a Hungarian data protection culture.