Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)
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Data protection legislation is substantially about protecting the privacy of individuals and ensuring, if I can put it this way, that human beings are not commoditised. When people access social media sites or individual websites to purchase a product or research holidays, one way in which this area is profitable is through the accumulation of information about the product, holiday, reading or sexual preferences of individuals or their religious background. Effectively, for a long time this information has been accumulated, commoditised and sold on. This happens when individuals who believe they are engaging in a one-to-one exchange with a particular web page do not realise their information is effectively being harvested, accumulated, used and sold. This is why people receive communications and spam about all types of things, although I have never quite figured out why for many years there has been a spam obsession with targeting everyone with offers of Viagra. I have not quite figured out what it was I once did online to merit multiple offers----