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In May 2022, prompted by Olga Cronin’s work at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (link below) I wrote to GeoDirectory looking for a copy of the personal data they hold on me.

iccl.ie/news/iccl-data-complai

There was a big palaver on their website where they only wanted you to use one particular method of making a request.

I ignored that and just sent a request in by email. Because you can.

From ICCL’s site:
“GeoDirectory is a company owned and controlled by An Post and Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI).

Buyers include Experian, one of the biggest data brokers in the world. Experian uses the data for “Geo-demographic lifestyle profiling” and “credit reports”.”

They wrote back to me- direct from the desk of the erroneously self described “CEO and Data Controller”

(That is not how being a Data Controller works)

They told me that they had checked and they had no personal data about me at all.

So I asked @OlgaCronin if that tallied with the records that the ICCL had bought from GeoDirectory. She was good enough to check my address. Sure enough there was a whole file on me and my neighbours. Eir code, address, co-ordinates, a unique identifier and then an assigned assessment of my demographic.

And here was the assessment of myself and my family, being sold for use in credit scores, insurance company decision making etc.

We were a Deprived Urban Family.

And, yet, just around the corner from my family’s home full of urban deprivation (as Geodirectory saw it) my neighbour’s life was very different.

They were “struggling young families in the countryside”.

Daragh Ó Briain

@Tupp_ed Coolock *was* rural… maybe 50 years ago. Wonderful fail of the principle there.