ITGS rules

As a general definition, data used by national and EU authorities for producing statistics are considered confidential if statistical units can be identified, either directly or indirectly, and information about individuals or businesses is disclosed as a result.

Under the principle of passive confidentiality, Member States have to take appropriate measures only if requested to do so by companies which feel that their interests would be harmed by publication of the data. This principle is recommended by the United Nations in its IMTS 2010 publication and set out in the EU legislation for detailed statistics on intra- and extra-EU trade. It has the great advantage of limiting the loss of information for users and thus making the data more useful.

Under the principle of active confidentiality, confidential data are automatically hidden by the national statistical authority if certain criteria are met, without the company needing to send a request. In ITGS, this principle applies only to the data by enterprise characteristics (i.e. by size, sector of economic activity or level of concentration).

Rules applied for granting confidentiality — The choice of the criteria to be met by the company is left to the Member States. The most common criteria are the following:

• the number of companies on the market is limited, e.g. fewer than three companies contribute to a single data cell; or
• the company is in a dominant position on the market (by representing, for instance, at least 75 % of the total trade) or is at least an important stakeholder contributing to a single data cell.