The Data Protection Commissioner is to clamp down on insurance companies which use garda information when probing insurance claims.
Commissioner Billy Hawkes is to publish a code of conduct with the gardaí in the coming months. The development follows concerns that one insurance company gained unauthorised access to information about people making clams.
The information was collected by private investigators for the insurance companies. Gardaí hold criminal records on individuals.
The Commissioner's annual report, published today, showed that the number of cases he investigated more than doubled last year.
Mr Hawkes said finding a balance between security, crime prevention and commercial interests and the interests of the private individual was increasingly on his agenda.
The Commission says the gradual erosion of individual's private space needs to be addressed by giving people control over how information they might disclose is used.
It says making people aware of the privacy challenges posed by social networking sites is also a task for the future. The Commission, set up in 1988 to protect the individual's right to privacy, conducted 658 separate investigations last year, compared with 300 in 2005.
Direct marketing complaints about telecoms providers, the gathering of excessive private data by public and private bodies and the failure of several nightclubs to provide access to CCTV were amongst the matters investigated by the Commission.
