The EU’s Data Act which is a comprehensive effort to address the challenges and opportunities presented by data in the European Union, emphasizing data protection, fair access and user right enters into force improving access to data in the EU market for individuals and businesses.
Data Act is the second key pillar of the European strategy for data, making an important contribution to the digital transformation objectives of the Digital Decade Policy Programme 2030.
The new rules will encourage the use of data and ensure it is shared, stored and processed in full respect of European rules.
Whether you are a citizen or a business, these new rules will improve your lives in numerous ways. For example:
- Measures to increase legal certainty for businesses and consumers who participate in the generation of data, including in the Internet-of-Things context, by clarifying who can use what data and under which conditions, and incentives for data holders to continue investing in high-quality data generation. These measures will make it easier to transfer value data while preserving the confidentiality of the data and will encourage more actors, regardless of their size, to participate in the data economy. The Commission will also develop model contract clauses in order to help market participants draft and negotiate fair data-sharing contracts.
- Measures to prevent abuse of contractual imbalances that hinder fair data sharing. Enterprises will be protected against unfair contractual terms imposed by a party enjoying a significantly stronger market position.
- Rules that will allow public sector bodies to access and use data held by the private sector that is necessary for specific public interest purposes. For instance, public sector bodies will be able to request data necessary to help them respond quickly and securely to a public emergency, with minimal burden on businesses.
- New rules setting the right framework conditions for customers to effectively switch between different providers of data-processing services to unlock the EU cloud market. This will also contribute to an overall framework for efficient data interoperability.
- Prices for aftermarket services and repair of smart devices will be lower. For example, if your smart watch breaks down, you can now request that any repair service, which may be cheaper than the watch manufacturer, gets access to the data. In the past, only the manufacturer could access your data.
- There will be new opportunities to use services relying on access to data. If you have machines from different manufacturers, you can now receive customised advice from a company gathering data from the different machines. Until now, each machine’s data was locked by its manufacturer. This could be useful at home, allowing you to connect your thermostat with your garden sheds.
- Better access to data collected or produced by a device. For example, your bar owner wants to serve better coffee, and the coffeemaker company wants to improve its product. In the past, only the company could access the data produced by the machine to design the next generation of coffeemakers, but the bar owner could not access information such as the temperature of water. The Data Act clarifies that both parties can access all data collected by the machine.
The Data Act also enables the public sector to access and use data held by the private sector to help respond to public emergencies, such as floods and wildfires. It will also protect European businesses from unfair contractual terms in data sharing contracts, so that small businesses can take part more actively in the data market.
The Data Act will start to apply in the EU in 20 months, on 11 September 2025.
