Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It is absolutely hateful and obscene that the Minister will from today charge people for the basic human right to access water which people need to live. As if this is not bad enough, to then demand with menaces PPS numbers and other sensitive personal information is really an outrage and the Minister of State's reassurances do not convince me.

The Minister of State says that Irish Water has given assurances that it will not send this information outside the European Economic Area. I invite him to look at Irish Water's website which states:

[T]he data relating to the customer may be used for marketing purposes. Irish Water may share the customer's data with agents or third parties who act on behalf of Irish Water in connection with the activities referred to above, [which is marketing]....Data we collect ...may be transferred to a destination outside the European Economic Area ("EEA")....It may also be processed by staff operating outside the EEA....By submitting data to Irish Water, the customer agrees to this transfer or processing.

This is updated information which remains on the website. It was changed after the uproar about this issue in the past number of weeks. The Minister of State has received some sort of assurances, which I do not trust frankly, from a company that recently sent out 6,000 letters to the wrong addresses. Even if the Minister of State was given assurances that the actual PPS numbers will not be handed on, any company can garner information from the PPS numbers which could be useful to third parties. The PPS number is a key to a great amount of information even if the PPS number itself is not handed over. It is clear from what Irish Water states on its own website and what data protection experts say, that we cannot trust a private for-profit company whose assets could be sold on in the future, with this personal sensitive information.

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