An 11th-hour amendment to the Courts and Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill of the Government of Ireland of 2022 will serve to "muzzle" those that wish to speak out about how Big Tech and public bodies are misusing their data.

That is according to civil liberties and human rights nonprofit the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, which is calling on politicians to veto the amendments when they're presented for debate in Parliament this week.

Since the introduction of GDPR in 2018, Ireland has become the primary Europe data privacy rule enforcer, simply because most of the biggest U.S. tech companies locate their European branches here, on the Emerald Isle.

In a nutshell, the GDPR is meant to give citizens real control over their data and make companies accountable for mistreating personal information through a higher degree of transparency with the right remedies where wrongdoing would take place. Famous data protection advocates and activists have merely used GDPR to achieve that, including ICCL and Austrian attorney Max Schrems, who filed many complaints against companies such as Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Facebook's parent Meta due to handling and transferring users' data.

But with an amendment proposed by the Irish Government in this area, it may muzzle any meaningful criticism from not only high-tech billion-dollar firms but also from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) itself.

'Ireland's enforcement of the GDPR against Big Tech and how it upholds the data rights of everyone in Europe should not be the subject of last minute amendments inserted during the end-of-term legislative rush, said ICCL senior fellow Dr. Johnny Ryan in a statement.

'Confidential information'
The new section 26A for the Data Protection Act 2018 would thus propose amending it to "prohibit the disclosure of confidential information" revealed at any point during a complainant's interaction with the DPC. So for example, a campaigning individual or associational or lay campaigner who has submitted a complaint to the DPC may not speak out about anything that is discovered or learnt as a result of that complaint (eg to the press) if the DPC itself has rated that material as "confidential". It's not quite obvious what information it could classify as "confidential, but it seems to be pretty broad, including "commercially sensitive" information, any information given in confidence or information that would reasonably be expected to prejudice the effectiveness and performance of a relevant function.

Should this amendment pass, the ICCL says that "it will make it impossible for journalists to properly report on Ireland's GDPR supervision of Big Tech firms, or indeed any organization, which list Ireland as their European base — this includes Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google and TikTok.

"Justice should be done in public," said Ryan. Public hearings should be the norm for the DPC; certainly, it should be conducting public GDPR hearings. But in the opposite direction, the Government seeks to make DPC decision-making even more opaque.

The Austria-based non-profit, co-founded by Max Schrems in 2017 as None of Your Business (NOYB), also issued their comments on the proposed amendments. Big Tech and the DPC "want privacy for themselves" by preventing people from simply talking about the specifics of a complaint.
"You cannot criticise an authority or big tech companies if you are not allowed to say what's going on in a procedure," Schrems said. By labeling every little piece of information as 'confidential' they attempt to stifle public debate and reporting. Instead of responding with valid criticism, they now attempt to criminalize it. The draft legislation in Ireland makes it a criminal offense to communicate any details related to a procedure. This speaks volumes that they fear the public and journalists above all else.The law would, however, enable the DPC to selectively communicate whatever information when it wants to.  It's mind boggling this happens in a European country."

TechCrunch has contacted DPC for comment and will update when we hear back.

*This article was updated to reflect that in actual fact, a complainant would be allowed to disclose details of the complaint itself and that he or she has raised a complaint, it would simply mean that he could not disclose details that may have ensued after the complaint.