CPDP is founded in 2007 by research groups from Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Université de Namur and Tilburg University. In the following years, the non-profit platform was joined by The Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique and the Fraunhofer Institut für System und Innovationsforschung. By now it has grown into a platform carried by 20 academic centres of excellence from the EU, the US, and beyond.
 
As a world-leading multidisciplinary conference CPDP offers the cutting edge in legal, regulatory, academic, and technological development in privacy and data protection. In an atmosphere of independence and mutual respect, CPDP gathers academics, lawyers, practitioners, policy-makers, captains of industry, and representatives of civil society from all over the world in Brussels.