Ms Niamh Sweeney:

I think this speaks to Assistant Data Protection Commissioner Neary's description of how these interests or interest-based ads work. The Deputy is right that a person owns all of the data they share with Facebook and they can take it back at any time or delete it. That is something I try to stress every time we meet with stakeholders. There is also the additional data of the interest buckets that would be appended to a person's profile.

He or she can download his or her information so that, in other words, everything he or she has ever posted or shared on Facebook is all sitting in one place and he or she can download it and port it under the GDPR to a different service, which is a new requirement, or he or she can just look at it and see what there is.

There is also the matter of a person's ads preferences. That now sits within a new settings area on our platform, given that, again, one of the criticisms we have faced in the past, on which we accept we need to make improvements, was that there were controls and settings but they were spread across the platform. We have now brought them all together in one place, in the same place where a user will download his or her information, which is everything he or she has ever shared with us, he or she will also find ad preferences. He or she can also access that from every single ad he or she ever sees on the platform. It shows the user the interests we have appended to his or her profile, based on some of his or her activity off-platform, if he or she has not turned off third-party data. The user can change those given that we might get it wrong. We get stuff wrong all the time. If we say that the user is interested in Manchester United and fashion, he or she might say that the or she is really interested in fashion but not at all interested in Manchester United - that is just a guess.