Barry Ward (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

My question is primarily for the commissioner.

I welcome the commissioner and acknowledge she has a very difficult position. I notice in the Data Protection Commission's annual report 2020 is referred to as being a platform or a stage for moving forward. I also acknowledge what the commissioner said today and I welcome that she said data protection is not an absolute right. Very often it is used by officialdom to stymie matters rather than to allow them to proceed. I welcome that attitude towards it.

I wish to ask Ms Dixon about the compilation of databases and whether it is legitimate for any organisation to take a number of publicly available and legitimate databases and consolidate them to create a super database that may be used to extrapolate other information from it. What rights are afforded to individuals to know essentially whether they are on that database, what information it has about them, what information it has extrapolated about them and what remedies are available to them in obtaining that information or any predictive scores or trends that might have been identified?