Katarzyna Szymielewicz

Polish lawyer and digital-rights advocate; co-founder, President, and Advocacy & Strategy Director of the Panoptykon Foundation, the Warsaw-headquartered Polish civil-society organisation she co-founded on 17 April 2009 alongside Małgorzata Szumańska, Piotr Drobek, and Krystian Legierski. Panoptykon's own team page describes her current role as overseeing "the strategy of the organizations and its new directions" and coordinating Panoptykon's advocacy on tech regulation in Poland and the European Union.

Szymielewicz studied law at the University of Warsaw and development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies before founding Panoptykon at twenty-five, in response to the rapid build-out of state and commercial tracking infrastructure in post-accession Poland and the absence of a Polish civil-society organisation focused on the resulting human-rights questions. She has anchored the foundation's three-person board as President since 2009 — alongside Vice President Wojciech Klicki and member Anna Obem — and is the most-quoted Panoptykon spokesperson in European digital-rights coverage of biometric surveillance, the EU AI Act, and platform accountability.

From 2012 to 2020 she served as Vice-President of European Digital Rights (EDRi), the elected pan-European member-network leadership role through which a national-member-organisation principal anchors the Brussels-headquartered EDRi federation. The role is structurally distinct from the EDRi Brussels-secretariat policy-leadership track anchored in the corpus by Ella Jakubowska: Szymielewicz's eight-year Vice-Presidency was the named pan-European elected role through which Panoptykon's Polish digital-rights work was translated into the European member-network's governance, while Jakubowska's Head of Policy track is the secretariat-side professional leadership that runs day-to-day Brussels advocacy. Together they anchor the corpus's two complementary EDRi leadership registers.

Outside Panoptykon, Szymielewicz is currently Senior Advisor at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) and a former Ashoka Fellow; she has served on the Polish Government's civic advisory board for digital affairs. ICCL summarises her focus as "algorithmic accountability, explainability of AI-supported decisions, the use of inferred personal data for targeted advertising and the societal cost of Big Tech's business model" — a four-front portfolio that maps onto Panoptykon's Algorithms of Trauma research track on surveillance advertising and the foundation's longer-running work on mass surveillance and platform regulation. She hosts the Panoptykon 4.0 podcast and publishes regular opinion pieces, the public-output register that anchors her standing as the Polish and Eastern European digital-rights movement's most visible English-and-Polish-language voice on AI policy and Big Tech accountability.