Ms Niamh Sweeney:

We know the Deputy's Green Party colleague, Mr. Jan Philipp Albrecht, MEP, very well and he played an important part in bringing the GDPR to life. Digital Rights Ireland is also an important player in this space. We have stepped up our engagement with it recently. I think it is fair to say that we do not always agree, and it makes that very clear to us, but we try to at least engage. One of the issues we have engaged on recently was facial recognition and in recent weeks, we outlined how we will be rolling out the option for people to opt in to that under GDPR. It has made it clear to us that it does not agree with how it operates, but let me make a stab at explaining how it works, so the committee can give us its view on that.

If one does not opt in to facial recognition, we do not create a template of one's face and append that to one's profile. When a photograph is uploaded with three people in it and facial recognition is turned on in respect of two of the people, in order to eliminate the other person, we have to scan the face, as such. "Eliminate" is probably the wrong word but we need to do that in order to eliminate them from the photograph. When we have eliminated them, we do not maintain any information about their facial or their biometric data. There is nothing appended to their profile. It is literally a process of elimination. I know some privacy rights campaigners still take issue with that, and I recognise where they are coming from, but we see benefits, particularly from a security perspective, for people who might be victim to impersonating accounts. It certainly puts paid to that straight away.

We have engage very closely with the Data Protection Commissioner on that issue. In recent weeks it asked us for a paper setting out exactly how it works, mirroring a lot of the questions the Deputy have asked. Obviously, the commissioner's office would have some additional technical knowledge on this matter. We have set this out in a very detailed manner in writing to the commissioner and we are awaiting feedback on that matter.

There were several other questions. We do not create shadow profiles. That is one of those myths. A shadow profile for those who may be familiar with it is the notion that if a person is a non-Facebook user, we collect data about a person and create a shadow profile, waiting for the day when this person creates an account. That is not the case. It is true that if one goes to a website that has some of our cookies or pixels embedded in it - the same website would have them for Google, LinkedIn or Twitter - it pings back information to us, as Mr. Kaplan described earlier, such as browser information as in the kind of browser one is using, whether it is Chrome or something else, and one's IP address. It is similar to the way in which Internet profiles work and I am sure Deputy Ryan knows more about this than I do. It is not that when it lands with us, and if we understand one is not a Facebook user, we hang on to it. It is gone out of our system within a matter of days and that is an important point to flag as well.

On the notion of surveillance, that is very important to us as well. We are signatories to the Reform Government Surveillance principles. A lot of the big technology companies have signed up to that. We work closely with law enforcement here and elsewhere on certain matters, particularly around child safety and child exploitation and lots of other pressing issues. We have very particular protocols in place when it comes to requests from law enforcement. The Department of Justice and Equality said it was going to initiate a wider review of our surveillance laws, via the Law Reform Commission and that would be a welcome development. We are very alive to those issues and, as I said, the Reform Government Surveillance principles are something we stand behind.

On the reverse lookup, have we shut that down?