Ms Helen Dixon:

This is an issue that does not relate only to Facebook and recently, in fact just last week, we made a statement to our peers at the article 29 working party of EU data protection authorities. We set out for the working party that as the Irish Data Protection Commissioner will assume lead supervisory status from 25 May for Facebook and other platforms that operate from Ireland, we intend to set out a strategic plan for the next 12 months in terms of the platforms' collection processing and tracking of users, which we intend to target for supervision and potential enforcement. Importantly, in the context of setting out that strategic vision on which we anticipated consulting our fellow data protection authorities, we also set out for them that there is a need to look much more systemically at the whole ad tech sector. It is not simply Facebook that is monetising data for the purposes of serving advertisements. The same applies to Google and many other services operating online. There is a need for us as a group of data protection authorities to divvy out the work and ensure we are tackling all of these issues and not just one platform.