Data Act or Data Hack?

 

Secret recipes have been around since the beginning of time. Whether they are ancient recipes passed down by monks, family heirlooms or popular brands,  formulas are kept in locked vaults. This is one of the unspoken rules of the kitchen. When walking in a restaurant, you simply don’t expect the chef to sit down and share his cooking tricks with you.

Likewise, also home appliances run on secret recipes. Each operated by a different technology, they deliver a great range of services to users. Ensuring intellectual property is protected at all times is therefore a key prerogative of all brands when marketing their products. If we take the case of a washing machine, for instance, most would agree that its main purpose is to wash your laundry. Yet, the EU’s proposed Data Act aims to go further than that, in its ultimate goal to make the data generated by the machine available to users. But what kind of data?

With appliances producing an unprecedented amount of information as we perform daily tasks, their importance must not be underestimated. “A distinction is needed between the data generated by the user, like the washing programme, the selected temperature or the cycle weight and those who are instead the very internal processes of the machine to comply with the request from the user – the recipe, in a nutshell,” explained Paolo Falcioni, APPLiA Director General. (...)