ATHENS — "Legislation and regulation should always be in line with business and technology. And this is an additional assistance provided by the specific approach of the General Regulation of Personal Data. It comes to assess specific issues that member-states face in the field and how, by instilling confidence in the process of interfaces and interoperability, one can increase the value that overall open data produces," Digital Governance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis said on Thursday at the conference on "Who rules the internet" organised by Nomiki Vivliothiki (Library of Law) and the legal journal "Law of Technology and Communication" in collaboration with the Economia Group, held under the auspices of the Digital Governance Ministry and with the support of the Hellenic Association for the Protection of Personal Data and Privacy.

As the minister underlined, "the challenge of the Recovery Fund for Greece is very great. Very large IT, telecommunications projects will be defined and demarcated […] I think that the better the legislative and regulatory approach is established, as is done now with the Rules of Procedure, the better it will be possible to establish our strategy on how to create data ecosystems around all projects."

Pierrakakis said that "we have created a new open data portal data.gov.gr in which the added value, starting with state data, are the interfaces, plus the fact that one can download this data, it can be processed, [and is] obviously anonymous. I would say that the whole management of the pandemic created its own challenges and opportunities. There is the pursuit of a mix. On the one hand, of personal data protection, privacy protection, and on the other hand, value creation that has many manifestations, such as transparency, productivity."