Match Group Calls Upon Irish Regulators to Respect Privacy

Match Group has contributed to a public consultation on Fine Gael politician Richard Bruton’s plans to regulate harmful content online.

The news comes shortly after the market leader opened a new Dublin office. A range of tech giants, including Twitter, Google and LinkedIn, have bases in the city.

The Irish Minister of Communications said in March that social media companies can no longer be trusted to regulate themselves. He has called for the introduction of an “online safety commissioner” to oversee legislation in the area.

Match suggested that any new rules could be inappropriate if they did not consider the variety of social media services they would impact. Online dating platforms, built around private adult-to-adult communication, have interfaces vastly different from social feeds.

It also makes most of its revenue from subscriptions, so policies targeting data-driven business models may be a bad fit. “We only collect the data we need in order to provide the best service possible. We have made a global and company-wide commitment not to sell or share our users’ data to third parties for commercial purposes,” said a spokesperson.

“We therefore suggest that a one size fits all approach, which does not recognise the diversity of platforms and business models, is likely to struggle in enacting its mandate – and could skew the market in favour of larger platforms, which have the resources to deal with complex or unwieldy legislation.”

Facebook also gave their take on the proposals, arguing that new sanctions should only target those platforms which “consistently” fail to follow takedown requests. 

Google made the case that trying to move the responsibility for user generated content, such as YouTube comments, could create enormous burdens for creators and regulators alike.

Read more here.