The Council of the EU on 5 November announced it has adopted changes to the EU legal framework on the development, production and dissemination of European statistics:

The revised regulation lays the foundations to make European statistics fit for the future by ensuring a sustained access to data held by businesses and public administrations for statistical purposes. It will allow the European Statistical System to tap the potential of digital data sources and technologies to satisfy increasing demands for new, more granular and timelier statistics and to be more responsive while at the same time reducing the reporting burden.

According to the Council Conclusions the European Statistical System (ESS) promotes literacy and ensures:

the availability of high quality and relevant statistics that will help to tackle disinformation and contribute to fact checking and the protection of democracy

New data sources, including privately held data

The amended regulation is found here. In the preamble of the regulation it is explained that new data sources will be added, including privately held data [1]:

(9) Accessing and using new data sources, including big data, which emerge from digital services and the Internet of Things (IoT), is becoming vital for producing timely, suitably frequent and sufficiently detailed European statistics in a more efficient and less costly way. Such new data sources also constitute an important contribution to building statistical sampling frames for ESS purposes. Therefore, access to new data sources in general, and in particular to privately held data, for the development and production of European official statistics on a sustainable basis and according to fair, clear, predictable and proportionate rules, in line with the Union’s fundamental rights framework, should be ensured. Access to privately held data should be ensured in conformity with the principle of cost-effectiveness and is not to entail excessive burdens on economic operators as laid down in Article 338(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

(10) Privately held data refers to the vast amount of data held by private entities obtained as a result of their activity, which could be used by statistical authorities to produce official statistics. It might include data held by civil society organisations, among others. Such data can be key to complementing official statistics and monitoring economic, social, and environmental progress and in particular progress related to the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. The use of such data should therefore be strongly encouraged.

According to the regulation national authorities also have to provide data [2]. This may e.g. include the tax data held by tax authorities.

Personal data for European statistics

When private entities and national authorities have to share their data, personal data will be included:

(21) Where the activities to be carried out under Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 involve the processing of personal data for official statistical purposes in accordance with the mandate given to the statistical authorities to request personal data pursuant to the specific methodological description for each statistical product, such processing should comply with relevant Union law on personal data protection, namely Regulations (EU) 2016/679 and (EU) 2018/1725. In accordance with the principles set out in those Regulations, such processing should be subject to appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms of the data subject. Those safeguards should ensure that technical and organisational measures are in place, in particular in order to ensure respect for the principle of data minimisation. Those measures might include pseudonymisation.

In theory there are safeguards:

(22) Processing of personal data for the purposes of official statistics by NSIs and other national authorities, which is considered to be in the public interest, should be covered by derogations and subject to appropriate safeguards, in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2016/679. For instance, further processing of personal data for statistical purposes should not be considered to be incompatible with the initial purposes for which they were collected. Personal data processed for statistical purposes in the public interest are confidential data and thus are subject to the statistical confidentiality principle, which means that they should only be used for statistical purposes and should never be used for supporting measures or decisions regarding any particular natural person. In that context, the particular safeguards, which should be applied when data sharing under Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 requires personal data to be processed, include technical and organisational measures such as privacy-enhancing technologies and the respect of the principles of purpose limitation, data minimisation, storage limitation and integrity and confidentiality as set out in Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and Regulation (EU) 2018/1725 and further elaborated in the European Statistics Code of Practice. In that regard, privacy-enhancing technologies that are specifically designed to implement those principles should be used to share data. Pursuant to Article 89(2) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679, derogations should be granted by national law to the development, production and dissemination of European statistics by NSIs and other national authorities, under the safeguards laid down therein.

The European Data Protection Supervisor was consulted and delivered an opinion on 6 September 2023.

The EU’s opaque microdata landscape

The documents do not reveal which microdata European institutions already have, which new public data will be added and which private parties will be asked for data. It can be assumed that financial institutions are already an important provider of microdata.
It is disappointing that the EU’s current microdata landscape is not described and, as a result, the public is unaware of what data about them is already being processed.

Notes:

[1] See “Article 17b Obligation of private data holders to make data available for developing, producing and disseminating European statistics
1. Without prejudice to reporting obligations, data collections or any data access laid down in sectoral statistical legislation of the Union or to the obligation for data holders to make data available on the basis of an exceptional need in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 of the European Parliament and the Council* , an NSI or the Commission (Eurostat) may request a private data holder to make data and the relevant metadata available free of charge where the data requested are strictly necessary for the development, production and dissemination of European statistics and cannot be obtained by other means or their reuse will result in a considerable reduction in the response burden on data holders and other businesses. Such data collections or data access may be included by the Commission in the annual work programme. (…)
6. This Article shall not apply to microenterprises or small enterprises as defined in Article 2 of the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC****, except in duly justified cases where the data held by such microenterprises or small enterprises are of specific interest for official statistics because of the nature and volume of those data at national level.“.

[2] Article 17a: “1. National public and semi-public bodies under national law in charge of administrative data sources, databases, interoperability systems or data relevant and necessary for the development, production and dissemination of European statistics shall allow the NSIs and other national authorities to access, use and integrate, free of charge, those data and the relevant metadata, in a timely manner and with sufficient frequency and granularity for the purpose of developing, producing and disseminating European statistics. (…)“.