Building a European data economy

Summary:

Communication published by the European Commission in January 2017 setting out a number of issues due to be subject of policy and legal solutions in order to consolidate the European Union's data economy.

Further information:

The 'data economy' is characterised by an ecosystems of different types of market players collaborating to ensure that data is accessible and usable. This enables the market players to extract value from this data, by creating a variety of applications with a great potential to improve daily life. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there is one single set of rules across the European Union (EU) covering the field. The one-stop-shop mechanism aims to ensure that one data protection authority (DPA) is responsible for the supervision of cross-border data processing operations carried out by a company in the EU.

As announced in the Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy, the European Commission's set as an objective to create a clear and adapted policy and legal framework for the data economy. This Communication aims at presenting focussed issues for discussion with a view to 'building a European data economy'. Accordingly, the document explores the following issues: free flow of data; access and transfer in relation to machine-generated data; liability and safety in the context of emerging technologies; and portability of non-personal data, interoperability and standards. This Communication also sets out suggestions for experimenting with common regulatory solutions in a real-life environment.

Official

EUR-Lex: SWD(2017)002: Commission Staff Working Document on the free flow of data and emerging issues of the European data economy http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=SWD:2017:002:FIN

European Commission: Press Release, 10/01/2017: Commission outlines next steps towards a European data economy http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-5_en.htm

European Commission: Fact Sheet, 10/01/2017: Building the European Data Economy – Questions and answers http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-17-6_en.htm

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