Data protection office seeks PR agency for ‘busy’ task

It is standard these days for organisations to claim to be "busy" when it comes to public relations. But in the case of the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner this may well turn out to be an understatement.

The Department of Justice and Equality is seeking to appoint a "specialist communications firm" that will "assist in managing the busy communications and media functions" of the office, which is headed by Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon.

“Working with the ODPC’s team, the successful agency will co-ordinate the ODPC’s general proactive and reactive communications across a range of stakeholder types in addition to advising on the office’s media activities,” according to the published tender notice.

The successful PR agency can expect a stream of incoming queries to come from international media and privacy campaigners as well as Irish ones – the ODPC earlier this year assumed responsibility for ensuring the privacy and data of about 300 million people outside the US who use Twitter each month is respected.

The office, which had its budget doubled this year to €3.65 million, already oversees the data protection standards of a variety of other large multinationals based in Ireland, such as Google, LinkedIn and Facebook.

The deadline for the tender is June 12th, which should be just about enough time for the pitching agencies to brush up on the difference between data matching and data processing, enforcement notices and prohibition notices, session cookies and persistent ones.