Mr. Brian Sheehan:

I thank the Senator. The Social Democrats do not hold any information on voters or marked registers. We have a database of members' information and we have access to the registers which are supplied by the city and county councils. We do not collect marked registers and we do not store the information about marked registers.

We target advertising based on geography if a candidate is in a specific geographic area. That is the primary way we do it. That is gleaned from information a person supplies to Facebook, like all the advertisements that appear on Facebook in that sense. It is transparent. Facebook implemented a system where you can look up who is targeting you and who is paying for the advertisements. We are happy with that transparency and think it can be enhanced significantly.

I do not quite know why marked registers are available. I do not think that people would like the idea of knowing a record was kept of whether they voted or not. People are wary of large databases of information holding personal information such as that. We have long been advocates of an electoral commission with a much enhanced electoral register, so there is obviously a need to collect some information to know percentages of voting and so on, but I do not think that information should be available.