Ireland's online population is one of the most surveilled in the world, according to research from a VPN service.
Ireland ranked sixth in the world for personal information requests, putting Ireland ahead of more security-conscious countries including Israel, Russia and Taiwan.
Research by Surfshark shows that the Irish government requested information on more than 20,000 Irish accounts between 2013 and 2021.
The Irish state can order a social media company to produce data on an online account when there are shown to be national security interests at risk.
TD and Chair of the Oireachteas Justice Committee James Lawless said Ireland is one of the most surveilled online populations in the world.
“People's accounts and all the rest of it is being mined on request - most likely from law enforcement looking for information,” he said.
“Because of the convenience that [the internet] brings – online shopping prompting to you buy something because it’s in your style or Netflix saying, ‘you probably want to see this programme next because it matches your preferences’ - it makes life easy for us - but it surrenders a lot of the privacy we might have enjoyed up until then.”
Deputy Lawless said: “As a world we need to decide if we’re comfortable with that.”
“I think recently we’ve actually stood back a bit and said we’re not and that’s why we began to look at the trade off and ask if we need to introduce better protections.”
