Beyond Data Access: Who Truly Benefits?
The European Commission’s new Data Union Strategy aims to expand access to high-quality data for Artificial Intelligence, simplify data rules, and strengthen the EU’s global position in cross-border data flows. It presents a compelling vision: more data for innovation, lower compliance costs for SMEs, high-value resources for researchers, and more digital services for consumers. In other words, a European data economy competitive with the US and China.
Yet from the perspective of the MyData movement and the policy proposals of GFOSS, the strategy leaves a critical gap. It prioritizes industrial competitiveness and AI-driven growth, while giving far less attention to people’s self-determination over their data, collective data rights, and democratic oversight of data intermediaries. Without these elements, the Data Union Strategy risks building a more efficient but not necessarily more democratic data market.
Data Spaces Need Human-Centric Governance, Not Just Technical Interoperability
The Strategy’s flagship initiatives, data labs, cross-sectoral data spaces, synthetic data production, aim to break down data silos and turbocharge AI innovation. These are important steps. But they also highlight a deeper problem: European data spaces are being built primarily as technical and economic infrastructures, not as democratic ones.
From a MyData viewpoint, genuine human-centric data spaces must embed:
- real enforcement of individual rights: access, portability, consent, and sharing
- transparency and auditability
- mechanisms for meaningful participation
- human-centric intermediaries such as MyData Operators, who act as trusted representatives of individuals inside data spaces.
Without these conditions, data spaces risk turning into sophisticated walled gardens, where major data providers negotiate the rules while citizens and small actors remain passive data sources.
Data Cooperatives and Data Unions: The Missing Social Pillars
The term “Data Union” in the Commission’s strategy refers to the unification of Europe’s data markets, not the empowerment of European citizens. But modern data governance requires both.
MyData and GFOSS emphasize the importance of:
- data cooperatives where members co-own, co-manage, and co-decide how their data is shared
- data unions, analogous to labor unions, that negotiate collective terms for data use, compensation, and protection
- collective access mechanisms, especially for workers facing algorithmic management
In platform work, logistics, delivery, ride-hailing, and care work, access to personal and operational data is essential for fair pay, transparency, and protection against arbitrary algorithmic decisions. Data-driven collective bargaining is no longer a theoretical concept, it is already emerging through initiatives like Worker Info Exchange and PersonalData.io.
By omitting this social dimension, the EU’s Data Union Strategy frames data as an economic asset but not as a collective right or a tool for democratic empowerment.
Simplifying Data Rules Must Not Dilute Data Rights
A key goal of the Strategy is to “streamline” the EU’s regulatory landscape by updating the Data Act, providing model contracts, and reducing administrative burden for companies. While this is beneficial for SMEs, it raises two important concerns:
- Simplification must not weaken safeguards for individuals.
- The proposed support tools are business-centric, offering much less help to individuals, cooperatives, and data unions that seek to exercise rights under GDPR, the DGA, or the Data Act.
A human-centric data economy requires simplification together with stronger mechanisms for personal and collective self-determination, not instead of them.
European Data Sovereignty Requires Democratic Sovereignty Too
The Strategy positions the EU as a guardian of fair and secure international data flows and proposes guidelines to protect EU data abroad. These efforts are important in a world of rising digital protectionism. But sovereignty is meaningful only when it is also democratic.
A data-sovereign Europe must guarantee:
- broad participation in governance
- accountability of data intermediaries
- transparency in data flows
- safeguards against concentration of power
- individual and collective control over how data is used
Otherwise, strengthening EU sovereignty may simply shift power from foreign platforms to European intermediaries, without empowering the citizens whose data fuel the system.
Conclusion: The Data Union Strategy Needs MyData to Become Truly European
The Data Union Strategy is a step toward a more competitive European data market. But competitiveness alone is not enough. Europe must build an economy where people and communities, not only industries, have meaningful control over data flows.
The MyData and GFOSS perspective shows a clear pathway forward:
- shifting from a data market to a data democracy
- complementing individual consent with collective empowerment
- embedding human-centric intermediaries in every data space
- ensuring that value generated from data returns to the people who create it
- aligning innovation with rights, fairness, and transparency
Only then can Europe build a digital future that is globally competitive, socially just, and genuinely aligned with European values.
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Primary sources of this article:
1. Data Union Strategy digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
2. Από τα δεδομένα ως πρώτη ύλη στα δεδομένα ως δικαίωμα mydata.ellak.gr