Report of workshop on Privacy, Consumers, Competition and Big Data

EDPS: Report of workshop on Privacy, Consumers, Competition and Big Data, 2 june 2014
In March 2014 the EDPS published a Preliminary Opinion on 'Privacy and competitiveness in the age of big data: The interplay between data protection, competition law and consumer protection in the Digital Economy'. The paper has helped stimulate discussions between policy makers, regulators and specialists across these policy areas. The EDPS hosted a workshop in Brussels on 2 June, attended by experts from the European Commission, national regulators, academics and NGOs, as well as the US Federal Trade Commission.

This report of the workshop is structured according to the five big, overlapping themes which were subject of discussions:

1. The features of the digital economy and the importance of personal data to its development
2. The aims of competition law and how those are played out in practice
3. The various ways in which the interests of the ‘consumer’ are understood in competition law and consumer protection law
4. The extent to which privacy is considered a competitive advantage in digital markets
5. Challenges for enforcement cooperation in the fields of competition, consumer protection and data protection. (...)

Conclusions
It was agreed that stakeholders, regulators and experts should continue to talk about how data protection principles, in particular those of purpose limitation and legitimate interest, can be applied to the digital economy, and how the various policy areas could be deployed most effectively to facilitate transparency, choice and competitiveness in privacy policies which protected the fundamental rights and interests of individuals. Data protection and competition specialists do not necessarily speak the same language. Laws may currently be applied effectively to address visible large scale abuses. But the laws seem not to cover the incremental ‘day-by-day drops into the ocean of data’ which are assembled to construct user profiles, where even seemingly innocuous data can reveal sensitive information. This process will be accelerated as more and more devices go online, which will in turn intensify the need for privacy by design, high standards of data security and data minimisation. (…)