Ms Niamh Sweeney:

It is a highly regulated space. In time, people will become more used to how the technology works.

To illustrate the point, when Deputy Eamon Ryan researched a house on the Airbnb website, I presume he did not book it, or maybe he did. One of the failings of the system is that advertisers sometimes do not realise someone has already bought a dress, for example, and the person will continue to receive advertisements for dresses. The Deputy went on Facebook the next day and was served an advertisement for Airbnb. In that case, Airbnb does not know who the Deputy is. It knows that somebody who was logged in to a Facebook account went to its website and looked at houses in Mayo. This information allows it to tell Facebook it would like to serve an ad for houses in Mayo to the member of our service. However, it does not know who that member is. One of the things people find most worrying about this is that they think they are being watched. The way it works is that Airbnb will have embedded a piece of code on its website which pings a unique Facebook identifier back to us without it ever knowing who the Facebook user is. Users can operate in anonymity on the web without the websites they are visiting knowing who they are. This service allows the advertiser to reach Facebook users but there is a kind of Chinese wall in place that keeps the user's identity hidden.