A new act on national data assets ("National Data Assets Act") has been approved and published in Hungary and the new law will be in force from 27th of July, 2021.

What do national data assets mean and why is the new act important in the data economy?

National data assets mean data held by public service bodies (i.e. organisations engaged in tasks for the public interest; e.g. state agencies, authorities). It also includes personal data.

The main purpose of the legislation is to make better use of the existing (and continuously growing) amounts of data in the public sector by creating secondary data use and data analysis opportunities. The further analysis of such data assets can support the decision-making process in the public sector and in addition to this, it can also be a service for the private sector. Various use cases can be found where data held by the public sector can be a useful resource in the private sector as well, especially that the new act opens the possibility for the use of databases containing personal data in an anonymised form (i.e. the protection of personal data shall be first priority) for further analysis.

How will the new regime work?

The National Data Assets Agency (in Hungarian: Nemzeti Adatvagyon Ügynökség) will play a central role in providing information services based on the new regime to public bodies and also to private entities.

The new act covers data analysis activities based on requests sent to the National Data Assets Agency, i.e. the Agency provides a service based on the data held by the public sector. This means that this service is beyond of providing access to raw data, it contains value-added services. (Data analysis is defined in the National Data Assets Act as the processing of the data by human activity or by IT means, and generating new derived knowledge from the electronically available data, and drawing conclusions from the processed data by human activity or IT means.)

Another key element of the National Data Assets Act is a strict anonymisation procedure in those cases where the database to be analyzed contains personal data. The request for data analysis cannot be fulfilled if the personal data involved cannot be deprived of their personal data nature even by anonymisation. It is also a guarantee for the protection of personal data that the data can only be available for further use if the data of at least 100 persons can be anonymised in respect of the specified data set. (In addition to providing requirements for the anonymisation, the Act provides a legal basis for the processing of personal data in order to make the data suitable for data analysis in an anonymised form.)

How is the National Data Assets Act related to the EU legislation based on the Data Strategy?

There are several data-related legislation proposal on the EU's agenda based on the Data Strategy. The National Data Assets Act covers issues that may also be relevant for the purposes of the draft Data Governance Act (DGA). The reasons for and the objectives of the proposal of the DGA are "[...] to foster the availability of data for use by increasing trust in data intermediaries and by strengthening data-sharing mechanisms across the EU. The instrument would address the following situations:

• Making public sector data available for re-use, in situations where such data is subject to rights of others.
• Sharing of data among businesses, against remuneration in any form.
• Allowing personal data to be used with the help of a ‘personal data-sharing intermediary’, designed to help individuals exercise their rights under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
• Allowing data use on altruistic grounds."

In addition to the above, the proposal of the DGA "[...] complements the Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on open data and the re-use of public sector information (Open Data Directive). This proposal addresses data held by public sector bodies that is subject to rights of others and therefore falls outside the scope of this Directive." 

On the basis of the above, the DGA (and the Open Data Directive) primarily aims at accessing and sharing data as opposed to services based on data analysis under the National Data Assets Act. The DGA is also intended to cover services and solutions based on the use of personal data, while under the National Data Assets Act, anonymisation requirements are applicable to the personal data that are subject to data analysis.