Euralarm has welcomed the initiatives from the European Commission towards legislations promoting the data economy.

The European association representing the electronic fire safety and security industry pointed out, however, that specific provisions would generate security risks, if enforced as intended in the present draft of the Data Act.

Euralarm raised specific concerns with chapter II of the proposal that makes the sharing of data with third parties mandatory as access to this data could give a very deep understanding of the installation and performance of a system or service, resulting in an increased risk of security breaches, including cybersecurity breaches, both to a given customer installation and to the whole security system itself.

It also noted that the criticality of data generated by security systems recognised by national laws regulating private security and the installation of video surveillance systems and that these laws limit the right to share information related to or generated by these systems, meaning the data sharing provisions of the draft Data Act are therefore in conflict with these national laws.

Finally, the association said that access to pure operational data/metadata does not provide any benefit to the end-user, neither allows a smoother switching of provide and there is therefore no benefit in allowing/imposing any requirement in the way the data have to be accessed or managed.

In a recently published Position Paper Euralarm proposes several amendments as well as a new article to the draft Regulation in order to exempt security-related data from the obligation of sharing. Services Directive 2006/123/EC excludes private security services from its scope via Article 2(2)(k). Euralarm therefore believes that a similar exemption in the Data Act should be feasible.

A copy of the Position Paper can be downloaded from the Euralarm website here.