James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome the move in the 25th paper. That is progress and it is very welcome. It is good to see it. A number of my questions will be about the feasibility technically of meeting the requirements of my legislation and I suppose the witnesses have answered that in one sense because of the things that Facebook is doing voluntarily. Obviously it is possible. I had hoped it would go further and as Deputy Smith has just mentioned, I had anticipated perhaps that it would because the core of my legislation is the transparency notice, it is great to see what other advertisements are being run by the same page and it is great to be aware of the dark advertisements. I think that may have been available already in some cases, but it is important to be able to see who published the response of the advertisement. I know Ms Sweeney mentioned the difficulty in identifying an issue-based advertisement as opposed to a candidate-based advertisement because usually the candidate is front and centre so that one cannot miss it, so James Lawless is always smiling at you from Facebook. The issue-based advertisements can be more nuanced.

I have a number of questions. How technically feasible is it to address this? I understand that Facebook is working on it. I understand it is in pilot, if not in Canada or another jurisdiction, at least in the laboratory. Will Ms Sweeney confirm if that is so? How far away is Facebook away from being able to do that? In essence the provisions in the Bill - my understanding from a previous conversation is that if one does not see any real technical difficulties it is a case of rolling out the pilot. It would be great if they could confirm that it is just a case of rolling them out.

The second question I have is around the dataset. I appreciate and acknowledge the note sounded in the opening statement and indeed the note that Mark Zuckerberg struck last week. I am aware that Facebook is not a charity, that while it did some good work and some good activities and some philanthropy to an extent, the essence of the organisation is not philanthropic. That is not why Facebook is in existence. Facebook is a company, a corporate entity and it exists to make money. That is fine. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. That is what most businesses do, but if people do not pay to use Facebook - advertisers do but the general public, the 200 million or whatever number of users are on it do not - is data a revenue stream?

Has Facebook ever sold data to third parties? On a second and related theme, how many categories of data does Facebook keep for metadata use? I have heard the figure of 96 categories and I do not know if that is accurate or not. It seems like a large metadata set so will the witnesses respond to those questions?

The third question relates to Cambridge Analytica. Earlier today we heard from the Data Protection Commissioner, Ms Dixon, who set out the Irish context and what is being addressed there. We had a number of questions about that as well because it was the Irish Data Protection Office that responded to the Max Schrems complaint in 2012. It is a good thought borne out by a lot of evidence that if the ruling of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner had been followed through in 2012, then the Kogan app could not have exploited the loophole and Cambridge Analytica could not have accessed the data. If we extend that to its logical conclusion, Britain might still be in the European Union and Donald Trump might still be in the hotel business. How do the witnesses respond to that scenario? The key question is why did Facebook not act sooner. I appreciate that we have been over that ground already.