Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 17 April 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill 2017 and the Influence of Social Media: Discussion

2:00 pm

Photo of James LawlessJames Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Indeed not and we would not be here and we would be doing something else. In an Irish context it is a bit like the horse has bolted because the Kogan app is being zoomed in on. Much of commentary stressed that it is tip of the iceberg; it is the one app we know about but it is the unknown unknowns and the known unknowns that are the ones that get us. I appreciate that the witnesses supplied information in the opening statement about the Kogan app, but how many other apps have scraped or taken or improperly accessed data from Irish and worldwide users? I understand the figures are pretty high and it is pretty close to almost the entire data set. I would greatly appreciate an answer to that.

Given that we touched on GDPR coming into force in five weeks time, my understanding is that Instagram is not yet GDPR compliant and one cannot download one's dataset but I presume that will be done before 25 May.