Purpose
SCOPE Europe is dedicated to improving and maintaining the trust of users in digital products and services. We achieve this goal by promoting consumer protection in the digital world. Here, one key focus is on leveraging the potential of service providers to strengthen data protection through their own activities.
To this end, we commit ourselves to compliance with codes of practice or comparable self-regulatory measures. Through such voluntary commitments, it is possible to respond quickly and pragmatically to many of the challenges in the digital world – and do so faster than could, for example, the legislator.
Promoting consumer protection is a dynamic process. The rules and regulations to which we have committed ourselves must be continuously monitored to ensure a proper alignment with emerging social and technological developments.
We also have a raft of other measures to support trust and security in the internet, such as consumer information campaigns, strengthening best practices in personal digital security, and drafting recommendations and guidelines for companies.
Objectives
SCOPE Europe is calling for utilising the advantages of alternative regulatory instruments throughout Europe. We actively work for a variety of goals which include further developing effective minimum standards for self- and co-regulation and promoting their dissemination. Under the EU strategy for a digital single market, we are calling for a harmonised pan-European regulatory framework fostering competitiveness and innovation and, at the same time, guaranteeing trust and security by linking clear statutory objectives with legally effective co-regulatory measures.
SCOPE Europe is also calling for a regulatory framework fostering innovation in the digital economy. This requires dovetailing laws and alternative regulatory instruments into a coherent overall system. Concretising ethical and social common grounds in measures for self- and co-regulation facilitates faster and more flexible reactions to new challenges. Incentives, validation processes, and legal efficacy should all be harnessed to strengthen the business community’s responsibility and cooperative forms of rule setting. SCOPE Europe is committed to a constructive dialogue with policy makers, supervisory authorities and consumer associations and is, among other things, a member of the EU Steering Committee “Community of Practice for Better Self and Co-Regulation”, as well as co-chairing the working group "Switching Cloud and Porting Data", which was initiated by the European Commission.