An Post declines to reveal nature or source of personal information sales

An Post has reiterated that it uses only “publicly available information” relating to the State’s census in order to categorise the marital and economic status of Irish citizens. Picture: Denis Minihane.

An Post has reiterated that it uses only “publicly available information” relating to the State’s census in order to categorise the marital and economic status of Irish citizens.

However, the postal service has declined to say what the nature of that public information is nor what the specific source is, despite receiving a number of queries on the matter.

Earlier this week the Irish Examiner revealed a complaint had been made to the Data Protection Commission about the alleged sale of private information pertaining to Irish householders by An Post’s mapping subsidiary GeoDirectory.

That company's ‘GeoPeople’ database categorises residents of all addresses by socioeconomic and marital status, with labels such as "affluent city singles", "struggling older families", or "deprived urban families".

The company’s website states that “each dimension” of the dataset for sale “is based on data points from the national Census”. Census data is bound as confidential, and is generally withheld for 100 years.

When contacted, GeoDirectory again said it "uses only publicly available information (census etc)."

The Central Statistics Office (CSO), the custodians of census data, has now said that “no details related to an identifiable person or individual household are ever divulged to private businesses, government departments or public bodies”.

Olga Cronin, human rights officer with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties which made the complaint to the DPC, said: "GeoDirectory is being utterly opaque about its use of our data. They’re selling our home addresses with our eircodes and social demographic profiles that they have created.

“Who are they selling this data to? What are the buyers doing with it? GeoDirectory’s lack of transparency is just one of the reasons we’ve complained to the DPC about this,” Ms Cronin added.

She noted that while GeoDirectory states it does not market personal data, it “openly admits” that the various datasets it sells may comprise personal information when combined with a third-party database.
“They cannot hold these two positions at the same time. This is admitting that they are processing personal data,” she said.