How a bureaucrat in a struggling country at the edge of Europe found himself safeguarding the world’s data
From: Quartz
By Leo Mirani
DUBLIN—The world’s tech companies are coming to Dublin, as the Irish prime minister and his various trade representatives will tell you. Yet every morning, the man in charge of overseeing how these companies use our data cycles to Heuston station, takes a 50-minute train ride out of Dublin, and walks the last five minutes to his office next to a convenience store in Portarlington, a town of some 7,500 people in the Irish midlands.
It is an unlikely place for what has grown to become one of the most important offices in global privacy. But little about this story is likely.
The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) of Ireland was established in 1989 to “protect the individual’s right to privacy by enabling people to know and to exercise control over how their personal information is used.” Billy Hawkes was appointed as its head in July 2005, in what were to be the last days of Ireland’s housing-spurred boom.
The world was a different place then. Dublin’s skyline was cluttered with construction cranes as the business press hailed the rise of the “Celtic Tiger.” Facebook was still a niche service restricted to US college students. And the DPC dealt primarily with local issues, such as the case of the Dublin man who complained that a CCTV camera operated by the local tram service looked directly into his back garden.
Pluck of the Irish
It was also a time when Ireland was only just establishing itself as the European capital for multinational tech companies. That story starts in 1997, when Ireland passed legislation to cut its corporate tax rates from 36%, in line with the OECD average, to just 12.5% by 2003. As Silicon Valley picked itself up after the dotcom bust and looked abroad in the early 2000s, English-speaking Ireland became a natural choice. As an EU member state, it allowed access to European markets. A large Irish diaspora in the US made the country seem familiar and friendly. And the tax rates were irresistible. Google, among the first to arrive, set up shop in Ireland in 2003, the same year taxes hit their low.+
The technology sector now employs 105,000 people in Ireland and accounts for €72 billion ($98 billion) worth of exports annually, or 40% of all exports, according to a recent report (pdf) from the Irish Software Association. Big tech firms with their European headquarters in Ireland include Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn, Twitter, eBay and PayPal. Every month brings news of a new company establishing its European offices in Dublin.
Hawkes’s office has concurrently grown in importance. Despite deep cuts to the Irish public sector, the commission retained its staff of 22 and its budget of €1.5 million. In the last year, the staff has grown to 30 and the budget to €2 million, and the government has promised more if necessary.
Today, the Irish economy stands ravaged by a spectacular crash and five years of austerity. Facebook has grown to become the biggest social network in the world. And Hawkes is directly responsible for safeguarding the data and the privacy of not just Irish citizens or Europeans, but of nearly a billion internet users around the world.
The world’s regulator
Companies came to Ireland for the tax benefits, but stayed for the regulation. Facebook was the first to declare that users outside North America have a legal relationship with its Irish subsidiary (see section 19), not the American mothership. According to the company’s third-quarter report for 2013 (pdf), that is a total of 990 million people. LinkedIn did the same for its 175 million users, including Canadians, who live outside the United States. Adobe followed suit. Dropbox is expected to do so soon. (Google retains California as the sole jurisdiction for any issues, data-protection-related or otherwise.)
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