Data Law: a fair and innovative proposal of data
Increased digitization has boosted the volume of data in the market, which has generated the need to protect the personal data of natural persons. In response to this need, The European Commission introduced a bill called “Data Act”. Recently, the European Parliament approved the Data Law, which aims to promote a single data market in the European Union, allowing public bodies to obtain and use data from the private sector in exceptional cases, as public emergencies. Besides, the Data Law will promote interoperability, which will allow customers to change data processing service providers and establish guarantees against illegal data transfer.
The Data Law establishes common standards to regulate the exchange of data generated by the use of connected products or related services, ensuring fairness in data sharing contracts. Companies will be able to decide what data can be shared, and the manufacturer may choose not to provide certain data “by design”. But when companies draw up their data sharing contracts, the law will rebalance bargaining power in favor of SMEs, protecting them from unfair contract terms imposed by companies in a significantly stronger bargaining position.
The Data Law also defines how public sector bodies can access and use data held by the private sector in exceptional circumstances or emergencies.. Besides, MEPs strengthened provisions to protect trade secrets and prevent further access to data from being used by competitors to reverse-engineer services or devices.
The Data Law will facilitate the switch between cloud service providers and other data processing services, and introduce safeguards against the illegal international transfer of data by cloud service providers. This regulatory initiative is part of the European Data Strategy, that seeks to create a single market for data in the EU so that they flow freely for the benefit of all members of the Union. Definitely, the proposed Data Governance Regulation and the Data Law are key initiatives to drive data-driven innovation and ensure adequate protection of personal data in the European Union.
