Ireland faces challenges from privacy ruling

Ireland will not retain sole control over privacy disputes involving companies such as Facebook and Apple under new rules agreed yesterday allowing any of its European peers to challenge Irish rulings.

Under a “one-stop-shop” mechanism initially proposed in reforms of EU data protection laws, businesses operating across the EU would only have had to deal with the data protection authority in the country where they are headquartered or have their main European base, even if the alleged mishandling of data affects citizens in another country.

But opposition from some member states that do not want their national regulators to lose policing powers over multinationals such as Google, with an Irish base, led to the proposal being altered so that any “concerned” authority could object to a decision.