Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 3 February 2021
626. Deputy Emer Higgins asked the Minister for Health the details of the contract with a company (details supplied) to provide the aggregated mobile phone data to the CSO to facilitate its staying local indicator; the controls that exist to ensure no personal data are provided; and the contract term and value. [5060/21]
Amharc ar fhreagraThe Department of Health is currently engaged in a commercial agreement with Three Ireland, to procure an anonymised mobility dataset for the sole purpose of informing and supporting the COVID19 response. This data is helpful in understanding mobility associated with the pandemic and response and it is one of a large number of datasets analysed and used as part of the Covid-19 response including other measures of mobility.
Data from Three Ireland is collated from anonymised data sets at a macro scale, aggregated at Electoral Division (ED) and received by the CSO on behalf of the Department of Health to ensure good data governance. Data which has been anonymised is not personal data and therefore not subject to the GDPR. At no point has any personal data been shared by Three Ireland with the Department of Health or the CSO.
CSO, OSI, NPHET and IEMAG are parties to the agreement. The CSO receives the anonymised, aggregated data on behalf of the Department of Health and provides access to IEMAG for analysis, OSI provides visualisation of the data. Analysis and visualisation of the data are provided to NPHET. The Department of the Taoiseach has been given access to aggregate analysis and visualizations of this dataset (the Three Ireland dataset) through OSI to support the government response to COVID19.
CSO has also conducted some additional independent analysis of the data which is publicly available at https://www.cso.ie/en/statistics/othercsopublications/covid-19insightseriesmobilityduringthepandemic/. The details of the contract are considered commercially sensitive. The terms of the contract represent good value for money.
