European Data Union Strategy
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Summary
The strategy will establish a simpler, coherent EU framework for secure, large-scale data sharing between businesses and public administrations to power AI. It will align and streamline existing rules and practices, strengthen cross-border interoperability, and embed robust safeguards for confidentiality, integrity, security and IP. Concretely, it will: promote common technical and semantic standards (e.g. schemas, metadata, APIs); enable trusted data intermediaries and data-pooling mechanisms; expand access via privacy-preserving methods (e.g. anonymisation, synthetic data, secure processing); and clarify fair, transparent licensing for B2B and public-private data use. Closely linked to AI Factories, new Data Labs will federate sectoral datasets and connect to Common European Data Spaces to unlock high-quality training data at scale.
Action items
1–6 of 9 items
Source order · D = digital dimension- Item 1D · Digital dimension
Launch first data labs to scale data availability and link to AI ecosystems (Q4 2025). They will also offer trusted pseudonymisation services.
- Item 2D · Digital dimension
Launching the quality data for AI initiative: expanding high-value datasets under the Open Data Directive (Q4 2026); setting up a stakeholder forum with public broadcasters and AI developers (Q2 2026); making 30 million digitised cultural objects available for AI training (Q4 2026); and launching a crowdsourcing initiative for domain-specific data and language data in smaller European languages (Q2 2026).
- Item 3D · Digital dimension
Proposal to consolidate data legislation (Q4 2025)
- Item 4D · Digital dimension
Proposal to update ePrivacy rules on cookies and similar technologies (Q4 2025)
- Item 5D · Digital dimension
Proposal for targeted GDPR adjustments (Q4 2025)
- Item 6D · Digital dimension
Launching a one-click compliance initiative (from Q4 2025 onwards)