Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Amendment No. 93 is not a tidying-up amendment. It seeks to delete an amendment we had accepted on Committee Stage, which was a pretty innocuous amendment in that it only obliged a controller to give a person such further information as he or she might need to exercise his or rights under Part 5. It adds one additional point to the list in section 89(2) in terms of information which data subjects have a right to get from data controllers. Most of the items of information included in subsection (2), such as information on a controller's contact details, the right to lodge a complaint and the purpose for which the data is being processed and so on, are replicated in the GDPR and the directive but the point, "such further information as is necessary to enable the data subject to exercise his or her rights", is not included in this Bill. The amendment tabled and accepted on Committee Stage sought to ensure that it is included and the Government is now taking it out. Given we are speaking about Part 5 and people caught up in the criminal justice system, people who more often than not are poor or are vulnerable and do not know much about their rights let alone how to exercise them, I do not believe it would be a burden on the Garda Síochána or the Director of Public Prosecutions, DPP, to give these people a leaflet about their rights and information about to whom they can make a complaint if they believe their rights have been infringed. We are at a loss as to why it should be taken out of the Bill.

On amendment No. 94, Article 13(2)(f) of the GDPR gives people a right to be given information about the existence of automated decision-making, including profiling and, at least in those cases, a right to meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject. This right is not replicated in the directive or in this Bill. We believe it should be included and that it could be potentially valuable. The criminal justice directive transposed in Part 5 prohibits automated processing, including profiling that results in discrimination, but to enforce the right not to be profiled, a person would have to be told about it when he or she exercises the right of access to information he or she is being given under section 90, but this section, as drafted, does not oblige the controllers to inform people that they have been profiled or subjected to automated processing. Again, because this is Part 5, what we are talking about is potential profiling of innocent citizens in a discriminatory way by the Garda Síochána and so on. We believe it is very important that people get the information they need. If somebody asks for information about what the Garda has been doing with his or her data, he or she should be given all of the information so that he or she can judge whether the profiling is discriminatory. Amendment No. 94 would achieve this. We have no problem with amendment No. 95 which is essentially a tidying-up amendment.

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