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With more and more everyday activities shifting to the digital world, digital proof of one's identity is becoming enormously important. Secure digital identities already play a key role in the digital ecosystem: they guarantee high security requirements, protect individuals and processes and create trust between senders and recipients. In order to leverage the potential of digital identities, what is needed above all is harmonisation of regulation and cooperation between the public and private sectors.

The urgently needed digitisation and the expansion of Germany as a digital location can only succeed if we systematically exploit data treasures, simplify data use and maintain data transfers internationally. This will also determine whether we can make full use of technologies such as artificial intelligence and the cloud and hold our own in global competition.

The EU Commission is presenting new standard data protection clauses to make international data transfers more legally secure. The background to this is the ruling of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) from the summer of 2020, which declared the so-called Privacy Shield, which regulated the exchange of data between the EU and the USA, invalid and which established additional requirements for international data transfers.

If done right, the European Commission’s initial proposal on the Data Governance Act (DGA) has the potential to be an important step towards a European data economy. While previous discussions about the use of data have focused primarily on the important topic of data protection, there is an increasing awareness for the innovative potential of data, which is why we welcome that the DGA addresses all types of data (personal, non-personal, government sector and specific data sets).