What does the EU’s Data Governance Act mean for smart cities?

Source: Cities Today Published: December 4th, 2020

A new approach to data sharing outlined by the European Commission (EC) last week could accelerate smart city initiatives. Potential benefits include more advanced solutions to climate change, health and mobility challenges; better ability to port innovation between cities; and new personalised services for residents.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told Cities Today: “The regulation will facilitate data sharing across the EU and between sectors to create wealth for society, increase control and trust of both citizens and companies regarding their data, and offer an alternative European model to [the] data handling practices of major tech platforms.

“We need to have safe and secure data management to make sure that our citizens and companies can fully benefit from the potential of data.”

The proposed Data Governance Act would be the first piece of legislation to underpin the European data strategy, outlined in February. The strategy aims to create a single market for data, where private and public entities can fully control the use of the data they generate, as well as benefit from the use of high-quality data themselves.

Portable services

The legislation seeks to make the reuse of data held by the public sector more widespread, including sensitive data which is subject to data protection legislation, intellectual property, or containing trade secrets or other commercially sensitive information. This could improve cities’ ability to monitor and analyse large amounts of data and foster the creation of more cross-domain services.

“With these new rules, such data can now be shared. They can be made available for reuse because their level of legitimate protection will be maintained, even if they travel to another country,” said Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission.

The regulation also defines a set of rules for data intermediaries, which will act as neutral, trustworthy ‘organisers’ of data sharing.

This aims to give public bodies and companies confidence that their data will not be used for any other purposes than the ones they have specifically agreed to. It is intended as an alternative model to the data-handling practices of big tech platforms.

This functionality could facilitate data transfer between cities and enable the creation of portable data-driven city services.

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash