Photo of Jay Modrall (BE)

On 23 February 2022 the EU Commission published its long-awaited Data Act, the last major building block of the Commission’s February 2020 Data Strategy. The Data Act:

  • Is an ambitious piece of legislation with implications for consumers and businesses across

On January 10, 2017, the EU Commission published a package of documents on the EU’s data economy strategy, including e-privacy, data protection and the “European Data Economy.” The Commission documents,  published in the context of the Commission’s digital single market (“DSM”) initiative announced in May 2015, illustrate again the strong links between the EU’s digital regulatory strategy, data protection, intellectual property and antitrust policy, notably including the Commission’s preliminary report on its sector inquiry on e-commerce, also launched in May 2015.

On May 10, 2016, the French and German antitrust authorities published a joint study on competition law and the collection and use of data, particularly so-called big data (the Big Data Study). Data protection as such is outside the scope of EU competition laws, but antitrust authorities have considered the significance of data on a number of occasions, often in the context of merger reviews such as the EU Commission’s Facebook/WhatsApp case.

On February 29, 2016, the European Commission published the documents comprising the new EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, the adoption of which we previously covered on our blog. In the Commission’s opinion, the new framework reflects the requirements set forth by the European Court of Justice in the Schrems ruling, which invalidated the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor framework. The Commission’s proposed adequacy decision holds that “the United States ensures an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the Union to organisations in the United States under the EU-US Privacy Shield”.

On February 3, 2016, the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) released a statement on the consequences of the Schrems judgment, following an assessment of the legal framework and the practices of US intelligence services. The WP29 expressed continuing concerns about the US framework for processing personal data for intelligence purposes, in spite of recent reforms.