European Data Act for fairer access to and use of data

What has changed?

The goal of the European Data Act  is to offer businesses, citizens, and governments more options to use and share data. These data used to be only or mainly available to the manufacturers of the appliances that generate the data. For example, the user data of smart devices.

The Data Act ensures that these data can be shared easily. For example, someone can share data on their car use with a garage for repairs. Or the user of an industrial appliance can use the user data to improve their business processes. The Data Act also makes it easier to switch to another (cloud) service to store and/or process data.

Data Act measures are among others:

• Users gain insight into their devices’ data and can share the data with other parties.
• Government agencies will have access to private users' data if it is needed to safely respond to a public emergency, such as a natural disaster or cyber-attack.
• New rules are in place that make it easy to switch between two cloud service providers (which allow you to process data).  3 years after the Data Act has come into force, providers are no longer allowed to charge switching fees.
• Cloud service providers must make sure that users can use different services at the same time. This increases freedom of choice.

These new measures are in line with the Data Governance Act.

For whom?

• businesses
• citizens
• governments

When?

The EU Data Act has entered into force on 12 September 2025. The majority of the rules governed by this law applies immediately.