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CERRE Cover Data Portability
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#Tech, Media, Telecom

Making data portability more effective for the digital economy

  • June 15, 2020
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REPORT | Making data portability more effective for the digital economy

This CERRE Tech, Media, Telecom study provides recommendations on how to make personal data portability more effective. This will truly empower consumers to use the services they want and share their data with whoever they wish, stimulating innovation in Europe. With the entry into force of the GDPR, European citizens gained new rights, notably with data portability. But two years later, there is still little sign of people exercising this right, and of companies offering an easy and convenient service for data portability.

While the European Commission is finalising its evaluation of the GDPR and closes its consultation on the European data strategy, the authors, professors Jan Krämer, Pierre Senellart and Alexandre de Streel*, warn that the current legal framework requires clarifications to better empower European citizens in a data-driven society.

In this study, they identify barriers to data portability, including the lack of possibilities to import data as well as the lack of common standards and tools to access data as easy as the click of a button. The ability to provide users with a centralised dashboard for monitoring and controlling the flow of their data is also critically missing.

“Today, consumers do not widely use data portability for reasons that can and should be overcome. Making data portability more effective is better for competition, for innovation and to empower users,” stress the authors. “There should be no second-guessing on whether to make data portability more effective, the time to act is now.”

The current EU framework encourages data portability, but there are legal gaps that the EU should fill. The authors insist on the need for detailed guidance on how data portability can be facilitated and on which data is subject to data portability without violating privacy rights. They advocate that data provided by users when using a service, such as search history (i.e. “observed data”) should clearly be included under the scope of data portability.

The authors consider it essential that the obligation to offer standardised Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) be much more widespread to enable consumers to continuously port their data.

“We believe that standardised APIs that enable continuous data portability is a prerequisite for encouraging more organisations to import personal data, and for encouraging more consumers to initiate such transfers,” explain the authors. Projects, such as the Data Transfer Project, have highlighted that continuous data portability is technically feasible.

The authors argue that Personal Management Information Systems (PIMSs), which facilitate the complex consent management and offer users a centralised dashboard for monitoring and controlling the flow of their data, will have a crucial role to play for the wider adoption of data portability.

“It must be as easy as clicking a button for consumers to continuously share data they created with one provider to another provider. This may also require educating and informing users on their rights through information campaigns alongside clear policy measures,” explain the authors.

Nevertheless, they stress that PIMSs are not likely to find a sustainable business model, and thus, policy makers should support the emergence of open-source projects by setting common standards for data transfers, consent management, and identity management.

An article, based on this CERRE report, was published in the prestigious Journal of Competition Law and Economics.

This report was presented and debated during a CERRE event, “Making data portability more effective for the digital economy”.

Author(s)
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Alexandre De Streel
Alexandre de Streel
CERRE Academic Director
University of Namur

Alexandre de Streel is the Academic Director of the digital research programme at CERRE and Professor of European law at the University of Namur where he chairs the Namur Digital Institute (NADI). Alexandre is also visiting professor at the College of Europe (Bruges) and SciencesPo Paris. Besides, he chairs the expert group on the online platform economy advising the European Commission and is a part-time judge at the Belgian Competition Authority.

His main areas of research are regulation and competition policy in the digital economy as well as the legal issues raised by the developments of artificial intelligence.

Previously, Alexandre held visiting positions at New York University Law School, European University Institute in Florence, Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and University of Louvain. He also worked for the Belgian Deputy Prime Minister, the Belgian Permanent Representation to the European Union and the European Commission.

Jan Krämer
Jan Krämer
CERRE Academic Co-Director
University of Passau

Jan Krämer is an Academic Co-Director at CERRE and a Professor at the University of Passau, Germany, where he holds the chair of Internet & Telecommunications Business.

Previously, he headed a research group on telecommunications markets at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where he also obtained a diploma degree in Business and Economics Engineering with a focus on computer science, telematics and operations research, and a Ph.D. in Economics, both with distinction.

He is editor and author of several interdisciplinary books on the regulation of telecommunications markets and has published numerous articles in the premier scholarly journals in Information Systems, Economics, Management and Marketing research on issues such as net neutrality, data and platform economy, and the design of electronic markets.

Professor Krämer has served as academic consultant for leading firms in the telecommunications and Internet industry, as well as for governmental institutions, such as the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and the European Commission.

His current research focuses on the role of data for competition and innovation in online markets and the regulation of online platforms.

Pierre Senellart
Pierre Senellart
CERRE Research Fellow
École Normale Supérieure

Pierre Senellart is a Professor and Deputy head of the Computer Science Department at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is also a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.

His research interests focus around practical and theoretical aspects of Web data management, including Web crawling and archiving, Web information extraction, uncertainty management, Web mining, and intensional data management.

Pierre is an alumnus of ENS and obtained his M.Sc. (2003) and Ph.D. (2007) in computer science from Université Paris-Sud.

Before joining ENS, he was an Associate Professor (2008–2013) then a Professor (2013–2016) at Télécom ParisTech. He also held secondary appointments as Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong in 2012–2013 and as Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore in 2014 to 2016.

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