Consultation response: Government Data Act SOU 2015:39
The referral was received from the Ministry of Justice
IT & Telecom companies have been given the opportunity to submit comments on SOU 2015:39.
Without commenting on individual proposals in the report, we would nevertheless like to point out the need for the IT and telecom industry, and for that matter society as a whole, to have balanced and effective regulation of personal data.
General - why access to information and data is important from a growth perspective
In the IT and telecom industry, the impact of globalization, servitization and digitalization (forces of structural change) has been evident for a long time. In short, the expansion of the internet and the digitization of information have made it possible to develop more efficient and useful goods and services to deliver to an increasingly large market. In both Sweden and the world, this has been the single biggest growth factor in recent decades.
Access to information and data is a key resource for exploiting the opportunities offered by digitalization. Information can create great value for businesses, citizens and the public sector.
The right protection and use creates the greatest benefit to society
The balance between personal data protection and personal data use is important to create maximum benefit for society. Of course, protection must be strong and effective; it creates trust. This is central to creating good, data-driven services. At the same time, it is important that the protection does not unnecessarily restrict legitimate and beneficial use. The right information should be easily accessible. Therefore, personal data regulation should be as general and technology-neutral as possible.
Value of public information withheld
According to many studies, there is a lot of locked-in value in public information that is not used. In Sweden, this can be explained in part by fragmented registry legislation that drives up transaction costs (and thus nullifies the benefit) for those who want to reuse PSl data. An analogy may be in order here. Historically, IT systems in many organizations have been developed internally based on the assumption that the organization's needs are unique. Over time, this has created major lock-in effects and made coordination gains more difficult (for example, patient record systems in Swedish health and social care).
The same lock-in effects arise (or persist) in the case of excessive special regulation. A comprehensive, general regulation of the processing of personal data by public authorities, properly designed, should have the potential to contribute to the creation of greater social benefits. For the public sector, business and citizens.
Full consultation response (PDF)
Government data law SOU 2015:39
Investigator's summary
This final report presents the overall assignment to review the so-called register legislation, a legal area that includes a large number of sector- or authority-specific laws and regulations that supplement the Personal Data Act (1998:204) and contain provisions on the processing of personal data by state and municipal authorities.
This review will be carried out by investigating the conditions for creating a general, uniform and - wholly or at least partially - unified regulation for the authorities' processing of personal data (Dir. 2014:31). However, law enforcement activities are not included in our remit. It should be pointed out at the outset that our assignment is essentially a legislative reform project aimed at making current data protection law clearer in the area of public authorities. Any significant changes in terms of whether and how authorities may process personal data or reassessments of previous considerations between, for example, efficiency efforts and the protection of individuals' personal integrity are therefore not included in the assignment.