Ms Mairéad McCabe:

My understanding is that the negotiation period will be up to one year. In the small number of meetings that have been held at working party to date, so many questions have come in from all of the member states and, in many cases, the Commission is taking them as new questions on which it will reflect such that I would imagine that there will be small but significant adjustments to the text as we proceed. As much of what is proposed in the text is at quite a high level, with not a lot of detail supporting it, there are many questions. For example, today some of the articles dealing with those services are being discussed. There will be many questions coming in the direction of the Commission, which will need to consider the full implication of the new linkages being identified by member states.

I imagine that Mr. Lowry has more information on the technical discussions, but I understand that they will begin towards the end of this week. The Commission is trying to avoid technical-, standards- and specification-related questions coming in at the working-party level, because these should be dealt with in the parallel technical discussions. It will be challenging to marry the legislative discussion that is happening on one train track with the background technical discussions. Mr. Lowry’s point about making it user-friendly, user-driven and workable is the ultimate aim. However, because there are so many different views from different member states, it will be challenging.

On the last question on protection of data, there have been numerous reassurances from the Commission that there be no profiling, no data collection, and no mixing of identification data with personal data from other services. There will be that physical and logical separation of one’s personal data. Trust service providers, TSPs, of attributes cannot receive any information about the use of the attributes. The intention is that there will be in-built protection from a data protection point of view. However, obviously, we will be checking in with the Data Protection Commissioner as the proposal progresses and as the text evolves.