Ms Niamh Sweeney:

On the notion of potential downsides for freedom of expression, I was quoting the Law Reform Commission's report from 2016. Those were the report's words rather than mine. The Law Reform Commission is very alive to these challenges. We had meetings with Ray from the Law Reform Commission and his team over the two years they were preparing that report. Unfortunately, the draft legislation did not include a definition of harmful communication. When the detailed scrutiny happens, other organisations will wish to come in and speak to that. The committee might have more faith in them than it has in us today.

We discussed lobbying with the Taoiseach when he met our CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in Menlo Park in November. We encouraged the adoption of the Internet content governance advisory group's report of 2014, much of which was captured in the action plan for online safety which was published last month. We had a discussion on the potential impact on freedom of expression with the Law Reform Commission's proposed legislation. That did get discussed.

On the digital age of consent being set at 16 and whether we would change the age, that is not happening. WhatsApp has set a minimum age threshold of 16 but it is still 13 for Facebook. There was much confusion as this debate was playing out. There are certain conditions attached to consent within the general data protection regulation. For example, it is not permissible to bundle consent. It is not permissible to ask for more than one thing in one go. There cannot be a detrimental effect if consent is not granted. A company cannot deny use of a service if somebody does not consent to the processing of their data. It is also used for very specific types of data processing.

I am getting into the nuts and bolts of it now. There are six different bases for processing data: consent, contractual necessity, legitimate interest, legal obligation to do so, and one or two others. Most of our processing is done on the basis of contractual necessity, which means that to provide customers with the service we are contracted to provide, we must process the data. For example if Deputies Dooley and Stanley and Senator Lombard were all friends with each other, for Facebook to surface the posts of Deputy Stanley and Senator Lombard in Deputy Dooley's newsfeed, we must process the fact that they are friends. It is that kind of stuff as against anything more specific. It goes out from there to how we surface an advertisement from Airbnb in Deputy Dooley's feed because it has this code embedded on its website. That accounts for the majority of it.

There is also legitimate interest, which is a fundamental right under European law, which is to allow businesses to conduct and have a legitimate business. Some data are processed on that basis.

Certain types of processing must be done on the basis of consent. They would include a person's religious views, political views and biometric or health data. In our case that would include facial recognition, which is a feature that a user must opt in to. Any Facebook user will have been forced to make that decision at some point between early April and 25 May of this year. As that involves use of a user's biometric data because there is a facial template created if he or she agrees to it, we must have consent to do that. We must have specific consent just for facial recognition.

If someone wants to fill out the fields in his or her profile to, for example, say whether he or she supports Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil, whether he or she is interested in men, women or both, etc., that is considered an indication of political, religious or sexual orientation. If someone wants to put anything in those fields, he or she must consent to the processing of those data. This works in two ways. For those aged between 13 and 15 years, either their parents will consent to the processing of those types of data or the service will be offered to him or her without such processing.

I have answered most of the questions. Deputy Bríd Smith asked many questions on, for example, migrants. Ms Cummiskey might address those.