Madam President
Commissioner
Colleagues
I would like to thank Madame Rapporteur and all colleagues who worked on Data Act. I believe that it will be a landmark legislation of this mandate, if it succeeds in harnessing the potential of data in all the ways we are hoping and foreseeing.
I would like to underline some very important points of the Parliament’s position:
– in the event of conflict between two legislative instruments, GDPR will prevail;
– we do not create any additional legal basis for the processing of personal data nor removing any of those that exist;
– it will help to enforce our citizens’ right to data portability provided by GDPR and
– we ensure the rights foreseen for a person who is not the user asking for a transfer of data, but whose personal data is still being transferred.
I would also like to mention my only remaining concern – the scope of what business will have to share with governments is much wider in the Parliament’s position than what I personally would have preferred. I agree that the aim was to create a safeguard by limiting the data transferred to public authorities to non-personal data only. It remains to be seen how this will be done in practice, as often datasets tend to have the two types of data in a format where they cannot necessarily be separated. It also remains to be seen how often due to this complexity will courts decide what constitutes personal data and what does not.
Thank you!