The Irish government has appointed Niamh Sweeney as a new member of the Data Protection Commission (DPC), the country’s data protection commission, which also has the main responsibility in the EU for monitoring that the big tech giants comply with European data protection laws.
The appointment has been met with harsh criticism from Noyb, an organization that in recent years has reported several technology companies that are considered not to take personal privacy seriously.
The criticism centers on the fact that Niamh Sweeney has previously been a lobbyist for Meta, a company that has violated EU laws and regulations on several occasions.
“We now literally have a US big tech lobbyist policing US big tech for Europe. For 20 years, Ireland did not actually enforce EU law, but at least they had enough shame to undermine enforcement secretly,” said Max Schrems of Noyb in a comment.
As recently as December last year, Meta was fined €251 million by the DPC, when the company was considered to be in breach of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
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