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The proposed legislation will govern rules for data-sharing related to connected devices and aims to help facilitate new services that leverage big data and machine learning across the EU.
Earlier this week (March 14), the European Parliament passed the Data Act to regulate how so-called industrial data should be shared.
The act establishes a common set of rules that govern the sharing of data generated by the use of connected products and related services, such as the internet of things (IoT) and industrial machines, and ensures fairness in data-sharing contracts.
According to the European Commission, 80 percent of industrial data collected is never used while its volume is growing constantly. In 2018, there were around 33 zettabytes of such data generated and the commission expects it to grow to 175 zettabytes by 2025.
“Clearly, Europe is not ripping the full value of data,” Pilar del Castillo Vera, rapporteur of the act, commented at a press conference following the vote.
The proposal would contribute to the development of new services, in particular in artificial intelligence where huge amounts of data are needed for algorithm training.
“The Data Act will be an absolute game changer providing access to an almost infinite amount of high-quality industrial data,” the MEP added.
When introducing the proposal, the European Commission estimated that the reuse of industrial data will create €270bn of additional GDP by 2028.
The legislation will allow users of connected devices to gain access to data generated by their devices and share such data with third parties to provide aftermarket or other data-driven innovative services. Currently, several types of data are available exclusively for the manufacturer.
For instance, a fact sheet of the act explains that a farmer that owns a tractor and an irrigation system of different brands may outsource the data analytics of its equipment and get customised advice based on the information shared.
In other cases, data recorded by devices are non-personal in nature but they could be valuable for the user or third parties, such as data recorded about the environment of the device or its interaction with other elements of that infrastructure.
The act also lays out new rules to facilitate switching between providers of cloud services and other data processing services, and introduces safeguards against unlawful international data transfer by cloud service providers.
Facilitating a multi-cloud approach for customers of data processing services can contribute to increasing customers' digital operational resilience, as recognised for financial service institutions in the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), the text of the proposed act says.
Additionally, MEPs have also strengthened provisions to protect trade secrets and avoid a situation where increased access to data is used by competitors to reverse-engineer services or devices. They have also set stricter conditions on business-to-government data requests.
The act passed the European Parliament with 500 votes in favour, 23 against and 110 abstentions. It will now be sent to the European Council for consideration.
The Data Act is the last horizontal building block of the commission's data strategy and it complements the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Free Flow of Non-Personal Data Regulation, the Open Data Directive and the Data Governance Act.
Additionally, this set of EU data rules will be further expanded as soon as forthcoming regulations such as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA) become applicable.
