Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

There was an interesting lecture last week by Marc Rotenberg from a US privacy NGO called the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He spoke at a free legal aid conference about the issue of data privacy. It was a very interesting presentation, at the end of which he asked what star we followed because it was highly complex and difficult to get this matter right. It was always going back to the ultimate constitutional imperative to protect and recognise individual rights. I fear that, in the catch-all provisions we are including, effectively for all public bodies to have data-sharing capabilities, we risk being in breach of the fundamental rights of individuals to privacy and be able to give consent where the legislation applies. We cannot be certain about the applications. Amendment No. 6 seeks to protect the best approach to data privacy, although it is burdensome, as Deputy Clare Daly submits. I remember discussing the point that our data retention laws seemed to be in breach of European fundamental rights. I argued at the time that it would come back to haunt us. I believe the Department of Justice and Equality introduced the measure in question. Particularly in a country that seeks to be at the forefront of the new digital industry and that benefits so much from being a centre for the digital services industry, we need, in both the public and private sectors, to set the highest possible standards. While it might be burdensome and require a lot of governance and effort on the part of the State, it is better and proper for us to seek to set the highest standard. Included in this are standards that allow citizens to withdraw consent.

Mr. Rotenberg cited the example of China. I am not saying we are in this category. The Chinese Government is using access to all sorts of online social data to build a really frightening surveillance state. We are not in that space, but as the use of artificial intelligence, facial recognition and a range of digital technologies evolve, it behoves us to be ever-more vigilant in protecting individual rights, which is the purpose of the amendment we propose.

See this speech in context