Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan has insisted the website set up for payment of the new household charge adheres to “the required data protection and privacy standards”, despite concerns raised today.
Mr Hogan was responding after Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes described as a “disturbing development” the proposal to use information held by the ESB in order to pursue payments.
Mr Hogan said his department had been in contact with the commissioner’s office on a number of occasions in December and a meeting would take place next week that had been arranged before Christmas.
All the issues in the legislation had been cleared by the Attorney General and the data protection protocols could be discussed with the commissioner.
“We need to track down people that don’t pay, in some way," he said. It was not fair if some people paid and others did not.
“We have to find a mechanism in conjunction with the Data Protection Commissioner to ensure that we actually trace those people," Mr Hogan said.
He committed to working with the commissioner "to make sure that we comply with information and respect the privacy of individuals".
Concerns were also raised by data protection professionals yesterday about what they said was a lack of transparency in the householdcharge.ie website’s privacy policy, and about the information it is collecting.
Mr Hogan said today the issues with the privacy statement had been addressed. He said no data sharing with bodies such as the ESB would take place in advance of agreement with the commissioner on the protocols that would apply.
He said the implementation of the household charge could only proceed in accordance with the law as passed by the Oireachtas in the Local Government (Household Charge) Act 2011. It was his intention that any access to data “will be as limited as is practicably possible”.
As of today, about 13,000 people had signed up to pay the charge generating about €1.3 million, he said.
Mr Hawkes told The Irish Times the issue of the data sharing had been very much on the radar of his office, because the provision had also been included in the legislation establishing the second homes charge.
“We had raised the concern with the Department of the Environment at that time, and we did it again when we saw it appearing again.”
Mr Hawkes said there was a certain expectation there would be some data sharing between government agencies, this was "extending the tentacles of the State into the commercial area".
“Obviously, when we give information to a commercial body, data protection law says that it can only be used for the purpose we gave it. So it has to be an issue of concern that it’s now potentially being used for another purpose.”
He said his office understood the provision was never used to access ESB data, in respect of the €200 tax on second homes.
“We have had urgent contact with the Department of the Environment and have agreed with them that if there is to be any access to ESB data it will be on the basis of a strict protocol, governing the minimum amount of information that is to be sought from the ESB and the security provisions governing it.”
Details collected by the householdcharge.ie site include an individual’s PPSN number, even though the tax applies to a property and is not levied on an individual basis.
There were also concerns that the website was in breach of a Google policy in its use of a system known as Google Analytics, which collects information on the use of the site.
The body managing the website - the Local Government Management Agency - took steps to address this issue when it was pointed out yesterday.
Agency chief executive Paul McSweeney, said today there was no single database of residential property in the State. The legislation establishing the household charge allowed for data exchange between the local authority body and other agencies, including the Revenue Commissioners, the ESB and the Private Residential Tenancies Board.
Mr McSweeney said his organisation would begin a process with those agencies in order to establish a protocol for exchanging data for the purposes of creating a residential property database.
“We would have a good idea ourselves as to what data we would like to get, how we would like to use it, what we would like to use it for,” Mr McSweeney said.
However, he said his organisation had to “respect” those other agencies and had not yet been in contact with them.
Payment information, such as credit card details, are not stored on the website but are instead processed by a third party payment body called Realex Payments.
Two complaints have already been made to the Data Protection Commissioner’s office about the householdcharge.ie website. Socialist Party MEP Paul Murphy has made a complaint regarding the use of ‘cookies’, small pieces of electronic tracking information, on the site.
Mr Murphy said today no information should be given by utility providers to facilitate the implementation of the household tax without the consent of the customers concerned.
He said he had written to the chief executives of ESB, Bord Gais and Airtricity to this effect.
"If they did agree to pass on this information, I would call on the trade unions concerned to campaign for their members to refuse to facilitate the imposition of this tax," he said.
Data protection and information governance consultant Daragh O’Brien of Castlebridge Associates raised concerns about the household charge website on his personal blog on Wednesday. Issues he raised about the householdcharge.ie privacy statement were later addressed by the website.
He confirmed he had made a complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner, in a personal capacity, in relation to the collection of the personal public service number (PPSN) where individuals register to pay the charge on the site.