About

Hi, I’m Kristjan Maalt – a researcher working at the intersection of privacy, data protection, and digital infrastructures.

I'm currently based at Aarhus University in Denmark, where my work focuses on data protection by design, consent management, and privacy-preserving information systems. I’m particularly interested in how large-scale socio-technical systems – such as online advertising, AI-driven services, and emerging “agentic” infrastructures – collect, move, and transform data, and what that means for people’s autonomy and rights.

Research focus

• Privacy by Design and data minimization in large-scale systems
• Consent management and user autonomy in platform ecosystems
• Governance and accountability in agentic infrastructures
• Empirical studies of online advertising and data flows

Contact Email: krma@btech.au.dk

My PhD research looks at:

• How the online advertising ecosystem actually operates in practice
• Why “more data = better performance” has become such a dominant narrative
• How data minimization and Privacy by Design (PbD) principles can be made viable in real systems
• How concepts like Contextual Integrity can help us analyse data flows, incentives, and power asymmetries

Methodologically, I combine systems thinking, empirical fieldwork, and design science research. That means I’m not only mapping how things work today, but also prototyping alternative architectures, workflows, and tools that could make digital infrastructures more respectful of privacy while still being useful and economically meaningful.

I’m also deeply interested in agentic technologies and the next generation of digital infrastructure: how agents negotiate on our behalf, how governance and accountability should work in these systems, and what kinds of technical and institutional safeguards we need.

This site is where I’ll gradually collect my writings, talks, and project updates.
Later, I’ll add a link here to a full CV with publications, teaching, and other activities.

CV link coming soon.