The Official Twitter Account of the Irish EU Presidency (@eu2013ie) tweeted earlier today about recipes.
That gave me a little food for thought given the subject matter I posted on yesterday.
- Ireland will hold the Presidency of the EU in the first half of 2013.
- Part of what we will be tasked with is guiding the Data Protection Regulation through the final stages of ratification
- Viviane Reding has been very vocal about the role Ireland will play and the importance of strengthening enforcement of rights to Personal Data Privacy in the EU.
- World wide media and our European peers will be looking at Ireland and our approach to Data Protection.
In that context I would hope that any Dáil Committee would have the importance of the right to Privacy (as enshrined in EU Treaties and manifested by our current Data Protection Acts and the forthcoming Data Protection Regulation) when reviewing legislation and regulation around Social Media.
While I don’t think that the recipes being tweeted about by the @eu2013ie account contained any Chinese recipes, the news today about changes in the Chinese Social Media regulatory environment are disturbing in the context of the rights to privacy and free speech. One interesting point about China’s approach to control of on-line comment from the FT article linked to above is this:
It has also tried to strengthen its grip on users with periodical pushes for real name registration. But so far, these attempts have been unsuccessful in confirming the identity of most of China’s more than 500m web users
Food for thought.