Charles Flanagan (Laois, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This amendment inserts a new section 29 which defines a "child" as "a person under the age of 18 years" for the purposes of the Bill. This is a response to a recommendation of the Joint Committee on Justice and Equality in its valuable report arising from pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft data protection Bill last year. While the data protection rights and protections that apply to adults under the GDPR also apply to children, the GDPR acknowledges that the personal data of children merits specific protection and it includes a number of specific measures for the protection of children. For example, Recital 38 states that the specific protections "should, in particular, apply to the use of personal data of children for the purposes of marketing or creating personality or user profiles and the collection of personal data with regard to children when using services". In addition Article 12, which obligates controllers to provide information to data subjects on the processing of their personal data "in a concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible form", states that its provisions shall apply "in particular for any information addressed specifically to a child". Recital 65 also refers to the rights to erasure set out in Article 17 and says "That right is relevant in particular where the data subject has given his or her consent as a child and is not fully aware of the risks involved by the processing, and later wants to remove such personal data, especially on the internet." The GDPR does not contain a definition of a child. This amendment will therefore provide clarity, which was a recommendation of the Joint Committee on Justice and Equality. However, the definition does not bear any connection to the issue of the digital age of consent in Article 8 of the GDPR, which forms the subject matter of the next group of amendments, which we will undoubtedly be addressing.