EU: Fix Digital Markets Act flaws to protect competition and users’ rights, 19 April 2022

In an emergency letter… ARTICLE 19 and other competition and privacy leaders urge EU co-legislators to correct the EU Digital Markets Act… [T]here is a severe flaw in Article 5(1)a of the latest DMA text. Unless EU co-legislators take urgent action, this flaw will help Big Tech firms undermine data protection and competition.

… The omission of the reference to ‘specific processing purposes’ may be used by gatekeepers to suggest they can combine data with a single opt-in… If the DMA Article 5(1)a text is not corrected to dispel this ambiguity, gatekeepers will wrongly rely on this to undermine both EU data protection law and to neutralise the co-legislators’ intended impact of Article 5(1)a.

… The removal of the reference to ‘processing purposes’ in Article 5(1)a deprives the Commission of the power to monitor gatekeepers’ data combination across processing purposes… The addition of the words ‘processing for the purpose of providing advertising services’ will enable gatekeepers to wrongly claim that a single opt-in suffices to legitimise the hundreds of data processing purposes related to their online advertising businesses.