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Taoiseach addresses Data Summit

20170621 DataSummitPost

The Data Summit (15 and 16 June) brought together a range of international, European and Irish speakers to explore some of the key issues around the role of data in an increasingly connected and digitised world.

Over the course of two days, close to 800 attendees from across a range of sectors had the opportunity to hear keynote addresses and panel discussions covering a range of topics and issues, including:
How to achieve the right balance around privacy and personal data, security and innovation;
Preparations for the General Data Protection Regulation; and Considerations around advances in technologies such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence for privacy.

The Summit also worked to showcase good use examples of data across the public, not-for-profit and private sectors as well as to increase awareness of data privacy and how people can manage their own privacy in an online world more generally.

Addressing the Summit on his first full day in office, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said;

I am very pleased to be here today. I am of course, keenly aware of the key role that data plays in the Irish economy but even more so of the role of data in our ever more digital and connected world.

And with this, we are generating and using ever increasing amounts of data, particularly personal data. I know that nobody here is a stranger to this concept but even one or two statistics are useful in demonstrating the volume of data that is being generated.

· Research from 2015 found that more data had been created over the previous two years than in the entire previous history of the human race.

· In the region of 200 billion emails are send every day.


The Taoiseach continued:

The idea behind the Data Summit is a simple one and one with which I think we can all agree.
It is about working to get the most of what data can deliver for society in a way that achieves the right balance with data protection, privacy, and security. And I have no doubt that the discussions over these two days will play a key role in informing this work.