While enabling many opportunities, the flows of data across borders — and especially personal data — also pose policy challenges concerning privacy protection, national security, intellectual property rights protection, trade, competition, and industrial policy. Without decisive policy action to allay these concerns, a lack of trust in the data flows that underpin today’s economy may hinder productivity, innovation and economic growth.

Data free flow with trust (DFFT) is a concept coined in 2019 to embody the international policy drive to promote the use of data for economic and social prosperity, all while effectively managing the associated concerns and challenges. The concept of DFFT is growingly recognised internationally, and is consistently referenced in global policy discussions.

After Japan introduced the concept at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos in 2019, G7 and G20 leaders repeatedly echoed the importance of advancing DFFT, and in 2023, G7 Leaders endorsed the G7 Digital and Tech Ministers’ Vision for Operationalising DFFT and its Priorities.

Through its work on data governance and privacy, the OECD has long served as a knowledge partner for its members, the G7 and G20 in advancing the DFFT policy agenda. Against this background, the OECD hosts a DFFT experts community to further leverage evidence-based and multi-stakeholder input into its policy discussions. This enables and bolsters more informed dialogue and helps to provide concrete responses to identified policy challenges.

In line with its priority to promote data free flow with trust for a prosperous economy, the OECD has formed an expert community to support the process of building trust surrounding data and their use across borders.

This new community gathers experts from governments, academia, civil society, business, and international organisations to provide project-based technical perspectives and evidence to the policy-oriented work of the Digital Policy Committee (DPC) of the OECD and its Working Party on Data Governance and Privacy (WPDGP).

The experts are nominated either by OECD member countries or the OECD Secretariat. Different working groups of the community will be created based on expertise for specific projects.

The DFFT experts community is expected to provide inputs on, but not limited to:

• Specific projects identified and specific questions raised by the DPC and WPDGP that require resources to associate practice-focused, multi-stakeholder projects with current OECD work items, in line with expressed OECD priorities.
• Horizontal data-related issues across policy areas or sectors, such as finance and health.
• Identifying possible trends and new issues related to data policies.