On January 27th, 2021, the Smart Cities Marketplace will launch its new Initiative “Citizen Control of Personal Data” within the Citizen Focus Action Cluster. We kindly invite you to join us from 15 to 17 h and learn more the initiative’s approach to handling personal data. 

Enormous changes will take place in the next few years in the field of data, moving from the current large-corporation approach, where personal data is collected for narrow commercial benefit, to an approach aiming at the greater good of society and the economy.

The intention of the “Citizen Control of Personal Data” initiative is to contribute to speeding up the adoption, at scale, of common open urban data platforms, and ensure that 300 million European citizens are served by cities with competent urban data platforms, by 2025. The potential for citizen’s personal data to contribute to data ecosystems will be significantly enhanced by introducing secure, ethical and legal access to this highly coveted and valuable personal data, incorporating citizen-generated data as “city data“.

The “Citizen Control of Personal Data” initiative will seek to remove existing obstacles and help build the conditions and relationships whereby the citizen will be willing to share personal data with a city and with other actors in the data economy. The ambition behind this new initiative is to give the smart cities movement a boost by providing cities with access to a rich personal data pool. This pool of data, in turn, would stimulate further activity within the data economy, accelerate the take-up of urban data platforms and contribute to the improvement of mobility, health, energy efficiency and better governance among other.