EUTA President Adam Jay, with executives from Booking.com, HelloWork, OLX and Trivago, sets out three tasks for the Digital Omnibus.
The European Tech Alliance (EUTA) today published a video in which its President Adam Jay, CEO of Vinted Marketplace, and executives from EUTA member companies set out what the Digital Omnibus needs to deliver for the companies that build and scale in Europe.
The video features Adam Jay, CEO of Vinted Marketplace and EUTA President; Maria Barros, Member of the Management Board and Chief Legal Officer at Booking.com; Christian Gisy, CEO of OLX; David Beaurepaire, Deputy Director at HelloWork; and Johannes Thomas, CEO of Trivago.
Their message is not a call for lighter rules. It is a call for rules that empower companies to build and scale in Europe. European tech companies do not need 27 different answers to the same legal question. They need one law, one rulebook, and one interpretation applied consistently across the Single Market. That is what simplification means in practice.
Three asks for the Digital Omnibus
1. Preserve the four GDPR clarifications that work.
- A workable definition of personal data aligned with CJEU case law, including the SRB ruling (C-413/23 P).
- Legitimate interest as a legal basis for AI training and deployment, with the balancing test and safeguards that come with every legal basis.
- A single entry point for breach notifications covering both the GDPR and NIS2, so that companies responding to an incident can focus on containing it and protecting users rather than filing duplicate reports to separate national authorities.
- Broader and more flexible scientific research provisions to enable our applied science teams to work effectively with data and drive innovation
2. Fix consent at the source.
Consent should be focused on what genuinely matters to users. Centralised browser-level consent (Article 88b) should stay out of the final Digital Omnibus text.
Europe should not hand its consent architecture to two browsers which account for more than 80% of the European market.
3. Make Privacy-Enhancing Technologies a strategic European asset.
The Digital Omnibus should incentivise the privacy enhancing technologies (such as pseudonymisation, anonymisation, data clean rooms, synthetic data and other) that make data sets both privacy-friendly and innovation-friendly. Recognition should be backed by open, interoperable standards, developed by the Commission together with the EDPB, ENISA and the EDIB, so that only demonstrably effective techniques qualify, privacy-washing does not pass, and competition stays fair.
“Simplification and a high level of privacy protection are not opposing objectives. They are the same project” said Victoria de Posson, Secretary General of EUTA. “None of the clarifications we are asking for weakens data protection. Each adds precision, not permissiveness. What matters now is that the co-legislators take the time needed to get this file right.“
EUTA and its members remain ready to engage constructively with the Council, the European Parliament and the Commission to deliver a Digital Omnibus that lets European companies build and scale, while upholding the high standard of privacy protection that Europe’s citizens expect.
Enable innovation. Respect privacy. Build a true Single Market. That is how Europe wins.
About the European Tech Alliance
EUTA represents leading European tech companies that provide innovative products and services to more than one billion users. Our 40 EUTA member companies from European countries are popular and have earned the trust of consumers. As companies born and bred in Europe, for whom the EU is a crucial market, we have a deep commitment to European citizens and values.
With the right conditions, our companies can strengthen Europe’s resilience and technological autonomy, protect and empower users online, and promote Europe’s values of transparency, rule of law and innovation to the rest of the world.
The EUTA calls for boosting Europe’s tech competitiveness by having an ambitious EU tech strategy to overcome growth obstacles, making a political commitment to clear, targeted and risk-based rules, and enforcing rules consistently to match the globalised market we are in.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Victoria de Posson, EUTA Secretary General
E-mail: victoria@eutechalliance.eu
E-mail: info@eutechalliance.eu
Phone: +32 476 25 08 16
www.eutechalliance.eu
