Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There is no doubt about that. The coimisiún's representatives will be more sensitive than most to the boundaries of its powers and where the gaps lie beyond that. My concern is that people do not know. As I said last week, when I first came into the Oireachtas, I had been in the GDPR space for a few years, had seen when it went terribly wrong and had to address it for companies when that happened. The Data Protection Commission is fantastic. Whatever about its critics, it has done an amazing job in a short space of time. It had significant pressure on it in Ireland. In a way, our guests get the benefit of its experience in seeing how it can be done. When I first came into the Oireachtas, I felt as though I was wearing a tinfoil hat. I never allow push notifications or sign up to emails or anything like that which could suck you in to staying online. I find it horrific that people go out for dinner and sit at a table with both of them on their phones and no human interaction. We are each being siloed off into our own worlds in which we are marketed to.

I do not think people know this. I am not sure it falls to Coimisiún na Meán to educate people in this. Its job is to keep people safe from the effect of it and to mitigate, regulate and enforce with regard to the platforms being responsible in how they do it. The fact of what is being done is not spoken about. Whose job is it to do this? I am not abdicating any responsibility as it is the Government's job. The Data Protection Commission can preserve our data but once someone takes out a presence on a platform, they are signing up to a contract that will go on for years. They have no idea what rights they have signed away that are hidden in this. People are drawn in, not knowing what they have engaged in, because they think about the reality, which is great. I have contact with my cousin in Australia and we swap pictures of our children and talk about our lives in the messaging service. We do all of this and we see the uplift of it, without realising that maybe we have the presence of mind not to be bothered. I would much rather sit and have coffee with somebody than this. There are people who are susceptible to being drawn in. I see it with my own child's resistance to me saying "but". They have it. They know YouTubers. They do whatever. We are against the tide. How do we communicate that this is happening? The cultural shift has moved to this friction-free world. We want everything instantly and we will buy into WhatsApp, which had the audacity last week to say "No" to the Minister, Deputy Foley, with regard to age verification. However, it has obligations. The companies will try to avoid regulation where possible and deny what is really going on.