Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

My questions are less complex. When I envisaged the coming into force of the GDPR, it was in the context of Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, the modalities and storage of data now and the fact that our data can be transported, used and commodified so easily. I must confess I never considered it in the context of who the person fundamentally is. If one was arguing for Ireland or the Government against the DPC where restrictions and balancing of rights come in, I would have said that this is bigger than GDPR. This is about who a person is and the person's fundamental right to that information. That said, it engages issues such as where I am advising a company on data subject access requests. I always advise it to put in a procedure of verifying the data subject who is seeking all this information. One has to have that absolute proof that this person is who he or she says he or she is, so that it is not for other purposes. Then we come back to where that is a difficulty. If one does not know who one is and one is seeking information outside of the provisions of the agency within this context, then proving who one is to get access to that data becomes a difficulty. That is where I see this needing complex legislation. We have a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed. That is a comment rather than a question. How does Mr. Sunderland think about that?

Second, in paragraph 19 he referred to medical information in the context of relevance and said there must be guidelines for the issue of relevance. How I understood that, and I can be corrected if I am wrong, is the threshold of relevance being when it is the medical information of somebody else and the relevance being congenital matters. If I was born without a finger, that might be a congenital matter, but if I had a finger severed in an accident after birth, that is not necessarily relevant because it does not relate to a child I gave birth to, for example. Has Mr. Sunderland any ideas on the thresholds of relevance?