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Europe lays out the rules of the road to its data reuse strategy
Today, EU legislators have put forward a major legislative initiative to promote the re-use of industrial data across the Single Market by establishing a structured system of trusted tools and techniques to ensure what they define as 'safe and privacy-compliant conditions' for data sharing.
The core components of the strategy are the creation of a network of trusted and impartial data intermediaries and a supervisory regime comprised of national monitoring authorities and a pan-EU coordinating body.
The change follows the European Commission's data strategy announcement in February, which announced that it wanted to boost the re-use of data to help a new generation of data-driven services powered by data-hungry artificial intelligence, as well as promoting the notion of 'tech for good' by allowing 'more data and good quality data' to fuel innovation with a common public good (such as better disease diary)
The broader context is that personal data is already regulated in a block (such as the General Data Protection Regulation; GDPR) which restricts re-use. Although commercial considerations can restrict the sharing of industrial data.
The EU Executive believes that harmonized standards that set technical and/or legal criteria for the re-use of data are required to promote legal certainty and trust—provided by a system that promises to preserve rights and safeguards and thus to make more data more useful.
The Commission sees the substantial business benefits flowing from the proposed data governance regime. "Businesses, both small and large, will benefit from new business opportunities as well as a reduction in the cost of acquiring, integrating and processing data, lower barriers to entry into the market, and a reduction in time-to-market for new products and services," he writes in a press release.
It has more data-related proposals coming in in 2021, in addition to a package of digital services regulations that it is expected to spell out early next month—as part of a larger re-launch of an industrial policy that prioritizes digitalisation and a green new deal.
All the legislative elements of the strategy will need to be supported by the European Council and Parliament, so that there is a long path ahead for the implementation of the programme.
