Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill 2022: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2022-05-26
============================================================

Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

The provision in the Data Protection Act has not been commenced but, yes, it focuses on the targeting, gathering and use of information. However, it is and would be appropriate to address it in this Bill. We have been ensured that part of the regulation of online content is content delivery. Measures aimed at content delivery based on the profiling of children are relevant to this Bill. It is very important that we put a marker down. When this area is talked about in the public realm, what ends up being talked about is children. When people talk about online regulation to anybody on any street corner or in a taxi, or to a friend at dinner, they talk about children. The fact is that we have failed to provide measures against the gathering of children's data and their being targeted and profiled and sent material that is inappropriate to them in an inappropriate way. We did not do it properly in 2018 when we had the chance. As I said, this Government and a previous Government have failed to do it in the meantime. We are also potentially at risk of not doing it in this legislation.
We will be hearing about online safety commissioners and everything else. What I am saying is that the question of how the data is being delivered to children and whether profiles are being made of children needs to be addressed as part of that. It is fundamental. I will not pretend that we have done lots of stuff with an eye on safety if we are not dealing with the issue of children being profiled and targeted.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2022-05-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:50:31+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-05-26