Protecting European Fundamental Rights – Supporting Responsible Data Management

• Transatlantic businesses require clarity and certainty regarding data transfers to operate and compete efficiently, while ensuring that citizens’ data is adequately protected, in line with requirements set out by the existing legal frameworks and jurisidictions.
• Cross-border access to data for criminal investigations, law enforcement and government surveillance needs to be based on a sound (international) framework with mutual legal checks and balances in place that include adequate safeguards to protect data.

Democratize Data and Break Down Silos

• Develop a holistic framework regulating data access and processing that also applies to industrial data and limit sectoral interventions to the required minimum.
• Support international cooperation for the development of data infrastructure including cloud, based on common values and rules and refrain from data localisation requirements.
• Ensure a fair competition and open digital markets to enable cross-sectoral data-sharing and stimulate innovations.
• Support a diversity of emerging business models, especially when it comes to B2B data platforms, and not impose too restrictive one size-fits-all visions of data marketplaces, which lead to hampering innovation and data sharing.

The Transatlantic Business Initiative (TBI) is the German business community’s contribution to a successful new phase in transatlantic relations. The TBI advocates for strengthening the economic relations between Germany and the United States and Canada. It is the point of contact for economic policy issues, particularly for the German government and the governments of the United States and Canada as well as for EU institutions. The initiative is supported by four business associations: The Federation of German Industries (BDI), the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK), the Federation of German Wholesale, Foreign Trade and Services (BGA), and the Association of German Banks (BdB).