Wouter Van Haaften

Wouter van Haaften (1952) is an Associated partner at Hooghiemstra & Partners. Wouter specialises in the legal aspects of self-steering and cooperative vehicles particularly in data protection and data ownership. He is also a specialist in vehicle levies, such as the electronic vignettes and mileage levy, and the legal embedding of artificial Intelligence and the Internet or Things. Wouter gives strategic legal advice to both the public and the private side and always seeks solutions that lead to progress in the innovative environments in which he operates.

Wouter is a PhD candidate associated with the Leibniz Institute, a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam and TNO. For the institute he also supervises administrative legal development pathways in, for example, Smart Mobility and acts as a guest lecturer.

During his career at the Ministry of Finance as a legislative lawyer and as a project- and programme manager at the Tax Administration, The Ministry of Economic Affairs and the  ICT developing organization of the Dutch Government (ICTU), Wouter has been involved in the creation of the electronic tax declaration, The Electronic Administration Act and the various start-up routes of road pricing and mileage. Within the Directorate General for Tax Administration, his portfolio included the protection of personal data in the period prior to the introduction of the Citizen Service Number (BSN).