Data Act Compliance: Navigating the Privacy Challenge and Unlocking New Opportunities

In our earlier exploration of "The New EU Data Economy: Unleashing the Power of Data", ?we discussed how the Data Act, effective September 12, 2025, is poised to revolutionize the digital landscape. This regulation mandates that providers of connected devices must grant users control over the data their devices generate, allowing them to share it freely with any party of their choosing. Data intermediaries, as defined in the Data Governance Act, will facilitate this process by providing the necessary technical infrastructure for seamless data sharing.

The Privacy Puzzle in Data Sharing

While the Data Act fosters an environment of open data sharing, it doesn’t alter the stringent privacy rules established under the GDPR. Whenever data is shared with multiple recipients for varied purposes, each specific use case must be clearly communicated to the data subjects, who must consent to each activity individually. Additionally, withdrawing consent should be as effortless as granting it.

The High Cost of Centralized Consent Management

One of the major hurdles companies face is managing consent in a scalable manner, especially when dealing with vast volumes of data and numerous stakeholders. Centralized consent management systems, where intermediaries manage consent (and its potential withdrawal) for each data transaction, can quickly become prohibitively expensive. For instance, if managing a single consent costs €1, a system with 1 million data owners and 10 data recipients would incur staggering costs of €10 million.

Decentralization: The Cost-Effective Solution

The key to overcoming this challenge lies in decentralizing consent management, enabling data owners to interact directly with recipients without relying on intermediaries. This approach drastically reduces costs, tying expenses only to the number of data owners. Using the earlier example, this shift could potentially lower costs from €10 million to €1 million.

Ecosteer’s Groundbreaking Technology: Empowering Data Owners

Ecosteer, a trailblazer in technological innovation, has developed a revolutionary solution that places unilateral control of data visibility directly in the hands of data owners. Their flagship product, the Data Visibility Control Overlay (DVCO), leverages a globally patented multicast encryption scheme to enable decentralized consent management.

How Ecosteer DVCO Works

The DVCO operates within the context of multicast architectures, which we previously discussed in "EU Data Act: The End of Data Monopolies". These architectures, built on publish/subscribe data broker protocols like MQTT, Nats, and Kafka, allow a data stream to be shared with multiple applications simultaneously. In this system, the device generating the data acts as the Publisher, while the applications receiving it are the Subscribers.

With Ecosteer DVCO, Data Owners, the legal owners of the data, can control who can access their data streams, significantly enhancing privacy and security.

Traditionally, consent management in such systems has been centralized, with data intermediaries controlling both access to data brokers and visibility of the data streams. Ecosteer DVCO changes this by decoupling data broker access control from data visibility control. While data intermediaries still manage broker access, visibility over data streams is exclusively managed by the Data Owner, empowering them to grant or revoke visibility as needed.

The Power of Ecosteer’s Multicast Encryption Scheme

At the heart of the DVCO is Ecosteer’s globally patented "Multicast Encryption Scheme for Data Ownership Platform." This technology encrypts data streams at the source, ensuring that only authorized recipients, as determined by the Data Owner’s consent, can decrypt and access the data. Granting consent is as simple as clicking a button, and revoking it is equally straightforward, thanks to the constantly changing cryptographic tools that secure the data streams.

Smart Contracts: Enhancing Decentralization and Monetization

To further decentralize and streamline the data sharing process, Ecosteer DVCO can leverage smart contracts. These digital agreements not only automate consent management but also facilitate the tokenization of data. This means that data owners can receive tokens as rewards for sharing their data, which they can then use to purchase products and services offered by data recipients, creating a new paradigm of value exchange in the data economy.

Unlocking New Business Frontiers with the Data Act

Compliance with the Data Act is more than a regulatory requirement—it’s a gateway to new business opportunities. Companies can develop scalable data exchanges using Ecosteer DVCO, reducing costs and legal liabilities while empowering customers to share and potentially monetize their data with ease.

Ecosteer DVCO: Flexible, Scalable, and Future-Proof?????????????????????????

Ecosteer DVCO is a versatile solution that can be implemented across a wide range of devices and applications —from smart meters and wearables to industrial equipment, smart TVs, payment apps, and web marketplaces—making them Data Act and GDPR compliant by design. This flexibility allows data owners to share any kind of data stream, be it video, sensor data, audio, or web navigation data, with complete control over who has visibility.

Real-World Applications: From Mobility to Healthcare

Ecosteer DVCO technology is already being applied in various sectors. For instance, in a project with AMT, Genoa’s Public Transport Company, citizens can control who has access to their location data, with the ability to earn rewards for sharing it. In the healthcare sector, the DVCO is being used to securely share data from air quality sensors and smartwatches, providing valuable insights to doctors, researchers, and other healthcare professionals while maintaining full compliance with privacy laws.

Pioneering Neutral Data Intermediaries

Start 4.0, Genoa’s Competence Center, has adopted Ecosteer DVCO to become Italy’s first Neutral Data Intermediary. By offering data intermediation services to its industrial partners, Start 4.0 is enabling companies to comply with the Data Act and GDPR without the need for costly infrastructure investments.

Data Sovereignty: The Future of Web 3.0

Ecosteer DVCO is also paving the way for the next generation of the internet, Web 3.0, by giving users full control over their web navigation data. Additionally, by integrating the DVCO with eSIM technology, smartphone users could gain unprecedented control over the data generated by their devices, independent of mobile operating systems.

What’s Next?

In the next instalment of this series, we will explore Ecosteer’s latest innovation, which focuses on decentralizing control over data records stored by companies, such as electronic health records (EHRs) stored by clinics. Stay tuned as we continue to uncover how Ecosteer is driving the future of data privacy and compliance.