The Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the EU completed, on 24 September, its mandate for the start of negotiations with the European Parliament on European data governance or the Data Governance Act (DGA) (see EUROPE 12786/6).
In addition to a clear delimitation of the situations where personal data are concerned and those where non-personal data are concerned, several important changes have been made.
The EU Council Presidency intends to give Member States more flexibility in the re-use of protected public sector data.
Thus, the EU Council states, “public sector bodies are not obliged to provide assistance to potential re-users in seeking consent or permission for re-use, but may choose to do so in certain cases”.
In addition, the definition of ‘data intermediation service’ now states that these actors “do not share data themselves but only provide an intermediation service to entities wishing to engage in data sharing”.
A non-exhaustive list of entity types has also been included to clarify the key characteristics of these services.
The EU Council Presidency has worked on data altruism as well which is the practice of making data available without payment for strictly non-commercial use for the benefit of the community. In this respect, the EU Council wants to encourage Member States to develop technical provisions to facilitate this practice at national level.
The requirement that an organisation active in the field of data altruism should have a legally separate structure from its other activities has been replaced by the requirement for a functional separation.
See the EU Council negotiation mandate: https://bit.ly/2XW3zyK (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)