Imagine if every citizen had an individual data ID and the employment agencies would use it to save their data in the same way as health insurance companies or universities. In Germany one quickly speaks of “transparent citizens”, in many other countries of a successful linking of different databases. Which would open up completely new possibilities, especially for research.
The mentalities differ, but the legal situation does not. Since 2018, the same basic data protection regulation, the GDPR, has applied throughout the European Union. But while scientists in Scandinavia, Austria or other countries have access to a lot of data from offices, authorities or companies for research purposes, in Germany they are all too often denied access with reference to data protection. Although the data can be packaged in such a way that no conclusions can be drawn about the identity of individual persons.
Jan Martin Wiarda is a journalist for education and lives in Berlin. On his blog www.jmwiarda.de he comments on current events in schools and universities.
That has consequences. The further digitization progresses, the more data is available, the more veritable Germany’s lag as a research location becomes. When Biontech announced the establishment of a research center in Great Britain, company boss Ugur Sahin said that during the Corona period, the National Health Service, research institutions, the supervisory authority and the private sector had “worked together in an exemplary manner”.
The traffic light has promised a research data law that will also “comprehensively improve and simplify” access to data for public and private research in Germany. In a current statement on the draft law, the German Research Foundation (DFG) calls for the “reduction of legal fragmentation in data protection”, in particular through a uniform interpretation of the GDPR”.
It’s not yet a data ID for everyone. But scientific knowledge must no longer depend on the goodwill or courage of the authorities and companies that sit on the data.
