Review of professor Ricard Martínez’s column: “Data Driven Economy: A country’s challenge”, published in the journal Tecnología y Sentido Común.

The digital transformation rests, among others, on a solid foundation, namely the reuse of large volumes of data with Artificial Intelligence (AI). This will allow —and in some cases already allows— building new business models and revolutionising management and decision-making processes. 

In this regard, the European Union gave a great boost to this transformative effort with the recent approval of the Data Governance Act (2022).

The EU model has as its first legal basis the respect and guarantee of Human Rights. Underlying it is the idea that protecting fundamental rights implies a constant public and private effort. This is a risk-based approach centred precisely on the dignity of the human being.
  
This approach is the instrument that sets the framework for enabling economic and social transformation or, as it has been called, the fourth industrial revolution.

Thus, when the EU defines as its main purpose the movement of data for its reuse, it endorses a series of rules aligned with the above purposes. Therefore, when it states that the flow of data must operate without limitations, it means that it must move in a market with actors on equal conditions in order to compete, where the right to data protection is respected and without affecting the right to property and industrial secrecy.

These rules are included in the Open Data Directive (2019). Its purpose is to increase the volume of public sector data made available to the public. The aim is to encourage the use of this data for innovation, research and entrepreneurship. Other rules going in the same direction are the aforementioned Data Governance Act and the proposals for EU regulations on the European Health Data Space and the one that will define the conditions of risk, certification, use and liability of Artificial Intelligence.

However, these rules will have no effect if the material conditions for their enforcement are not created. In other words, it is necessary to create a digital infrastructure with the technological and legal conditions that guarantee the conditions of use, lawful purposes, identification and traceability, for instance, to pursue liability for damages.

Given all of the above, the public sector will be challenged to develop data repositories that meet the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation and the Governance Regulation. Meanwhile, in the private sector, regulatory compliance ensures safeguards such as data security and traceability.

Review of the column Data Driven Economy: A country’s challenge, by Professor Ricard Martínez Martínez, director of the Microsoft-Universitat de València Privacy and Digital Transformation Chair, published in the July issue of the digital journal Tecnología y Sentido Común.