What is the price of our privacy?
Every click, every scroll, every heartbeat tracked by a wearable... it's all being collected.
In this Fireside Chat, we unpack a silent crisis: we’re surrendering control over our data in exchange for convenience, without fully understanding the risks. As surveillance becomes infrastructure and privacy becomes conditional, who really benefits from the endless extraction? And who pays the price?
What do you think? Are we truly trading freedom for comfort?
Bart Preneel
Professor of Cryptography, ICT Personality of 2025 | KU Leuven
Bart Preneel is a globally recognized cryptographer and professor at KU Leuven, where he leads COSIC, the research group behind groundbreaking discoveries in encryption, wireless security, and digital privacy.
Named ICT Personality of the Year 2025, Preneel’s influence stretches from EU policy to everyday devices. His team has famously demonstrated how easy it is to hack modern cars and keyless entry systems, forcing global manufacturers to rethink security in an age of hyper-connectivity.
As democracies quietly expand surveillance powers and private companies track our behavior at scale, the lines between safety, control, and exploitation are blurring fast. And with rising geopolitical tension, the infrastructure of trust is fracturing.
At and& connect, Professor Preneel will expose how fragile (hackable) our systems are and what the risks are for exposure of our personal data. And he’ll ask the question too few dare to confront: when everything is connected, who protects you?
Niels Bex
Product Manager Kate Belgium | KBC
Niels is responsible for guiding the roadmap and implementation of Kate, KBC’s AI-assistant. Kate has since expanded to serve over 2 million customers and has become an integral part of KBC Mobile.
Kate is a digital banking assistant. The foundation is trust: all data is secure and carefully protected, remains in European data centres and is never shared for external AI training. Kate is designed to make life easier for customers by adapting to their needs when it matters most.
Also, KBC Mobile is one of the world’s top-rated banking apps, offering hyper-personalized services to millions of users; including financial insights, proactive suggestions and personalized advertising.
At and& connect, Niels will share how privacy and innovation require constant (re)negotiation, especially in the banking world. This is an environment where ease-of-use and data usage are always in tension, and where banks need to find the right balance. We will learn from his experiences through the lens of Kate, used as the way to help customers control their budgets and support them proactively as well as reactively.
