US tech groups spawn a fight between Europe’s data regulators

Google, Facebook, Apple and now Twitter: the list of companies that submit to Ireland’s data protection regime is a long and growing one. Twitter confirmed that any complaints about data protection from its non-US users will be dealt with by Ireland’s increasingly busy data protection agency. But not everyone is happy.

In Brussels and national capitals across the continent, critics have been grumbling that Dublin’s enforcement of European data protection rules is too weak. The fact that the Irish Data Protection Commission is housed in Canal House, a dingy looking building on Station Road in Portalington, an hour outside Dublin, is regularly brought up as an example of the limited resources given to data protection -- much to the chagrin of Dara Murphy, Ireland’s data protection minister. “I marvel at the fact that people feel that business can’t be conducted over a grocery shop,” he says. The Irish say they follow the same rules as everyone else and that the criticism is based less on the basis of enforcement but on the fact that companies such as Twitter and LinkedIn opted for Dublin over Paris, Berlin or Amsterdam. The scale of large Internet companies, such as Facebook -- which has nearly 300m active users in Europe -- can dwarf the operations of data protection agencies originally designed to cope with the demands of, say, 4.6 million Irish citizens.