Recital 25

This Regulation should not be understood to confer any new right on data holders to use product data or related service data. Where the manufacturer of a connected product is a data holder, the basis for the manufacturer to use non-personal data should be a contract between the manufacturer and the user. Such a contract could be part of an agreement for the provision of the related service, which could be concluded together with the purchase, rent or lease agreement relating to the connected product. Any contractual term stipulating that the data holder may use product data or related service data should be transparent to the user, including regarding the purposes for which the data holder intends to use the data. Such purposes could include improving the functioning of the connected product or related services, developing new products or services, or aggregating data with the aim of making available the resulting derived data to third parties, provided that such derived data do not allow the identification of specific data transmitted to the data holder from the connected product, or allow a third party to derive those data from the dataset. Any change of the contract should depend on the informed agreement of the user. This Regulation does not prevent parties from agreeing on contractual terms the effect of which is to exclude or limit the use of non-personal data, or certain categories of non-personal data, by a data holder. Neither does it prevent parties from agreeing to make product data or related service data available to third parties, directly or indirectly, including, where applicable, via another data holder. Moreover, this Regulation does not prevent sector-specific regulatory requirements under Union law, or national law compatible with Union law, which would exclude or limit the use of certain such data by the data holder on well-defined public policy grounds. This Regulation does not prevent users, in the case of business-to-business relations, from making data available to third parties or data holders under any lawful contractual term, including by agreeing to limit or restrict further sharing of such data, or from being compensated proportionately, for example in exchange for waiving their right to use or share such data. While the notion of ‘data holder’ generally does not include public sector bodies, it may include public undertakings.