The European Commission is preparing to present its ‘Data Governance Act’ on 11 November, which will increase the availability of data in the EU. This 38-page draft regulation, as seen by EUROPE, proposes in particular the creation of an expert group and the creation of a European consent form for the collection of data for public good purposes.
It will need to be supplemented by an ‘implementing act on high-value datasets’, such as statistics and geospatial data, as well as by a ‘Data Act’, which will clarify the rights to use data shared between two companies (B2B) or by one company for the public sector (B2G). “We will also look at improving data portability rights and examining the framework for intellectual property rights”, Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton said on 26 October.
Next week’s proposal “aims to foster the availability of data for use by increasing trust in data intermediaries and by strengthening data sharing mechanisms across the EU”, the draft text says. A first draft had met with a negative opinion from the Regulatory Control Committee at the beginning of September.
Three missions
In concrete terms, the Act defines the conditions allowing the re-use of certain categories of data held by the public sector in accordance with European rules. It states that public utilities may charge for this service in a manner that is “non-discriminatory, proportionate and objectively justified”.
It also provides for a general authorisation framework for data sharing services for professional users (Title III) and another for the collection and processing of data made available for public good purposes, or ‘data altruism’ (Title IV). This authorisation should be valid throughout the EU.
As regards such data made available for public good purposes, the text specifies, for example, that the processing body should act in a not-for-profit manner and that it should be established either in the EU/European Economic Area or in a country with which the EU has concluded a data transfer agreement in line with data protection rules. This de facto excludes the United States, following the invalidation of the Privacy Shield by the EU Court of Justice. It also suggests that the Commission should develop consent forms for the collection of data for public good purposes by means of a delegated act.
Finally, the creation of a European Data Innovation Committee to accompany the coordination work carried out by the European Commission and to support the cross-sectoral use of data through technical standardisation (Title VI). Link to the document: https://bit.ly/2HS5rkN (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)