Facebook pressed the government to increase funding to the State’s data watchdog to push back at French, Spanish and German regulators opposed to making the agency the internet giant’s EU-wide supervisor. New EU rules introduced last year make the Irish Data Protection Commission the lead supervisory authority for social media companies such as Facebook because their EU operations are based here. Those EU regulators were “arguing against the ‘one-stop shop mechanism principle in the [European] Commission’s proposals”. The Facebook executive told Mr O’Brien he recalled him saying that Mr Kenny would be meeting the then Irish data protection commissioner Billy Hawkes “to discuss the work of the [commissioner]”. The Department of Justice released a statement at the end of March 2013 stating that then minister for justice Alan Shatter “underlined the government’s ongoing strong support for the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner”.

Source: The Irish Times May 20, 2019 04:06 UTC