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

Mr. Joel Kaplan:

We shut that down. The feature that Ms Sweeney mentioned was a useful feature, particularly in countries where the spelling of names can be difficult and it is easier to look people up by their phone number in places where many people have the same name. When many people had the same name, a common name, the feature was very useful, but it was subject to abuse by people scraping publicly available information. So only if the information was set to public, could it be scraped, but because of that risk, several weeks we shut down the functionality of reverse lookup.