Double Windsor

The implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation is an important step for Europe; it will be much more so if the giants of Silicon Valley agree to fulfill the regulation.

There is no doubt that the appearance on Capitol Hill of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has had a soothing effect, if not on the senators who have interrogated him with a scandalized gesture about data leaks and fake news, at least on the discouraged masses of investors who, after having made him one of the greatest fortunes on the planet, have withdrawn 14 percent of their confidence — and therefore the value of the company’s shares — in the last three weeks. There is no doubt, as we said, because since the day before yesterday, the first day of his Congressional appearance, Facebook recorded its biggest gain in a single day that it has known in the last year.

The question is why. Perhaps it was merely seeing Zuckerberg disguised as the millionaire he is, with the double Windsor knot in his silk tie where only the shabby collar of a gray t-shirt usually appears. Maybe it was just seeing him before the Senate committee, possibly one of the last places where he would have liked to be. Or maybe, and more likely, it was for apologizing directly, with a calm face and fiery grammar, for not having taken the privacy of his 2.2 billion users (about a third of the world´s population) or the veracity of the flood of information that overwhelms his networks on a daily basis, seriously enough. If admitting the existence of a problem is the first step in facing it, as psychologists always say, the Facebook crisis may have started to get back on track in recent days. It is not the light at the end of the tunnel, but at least the train has managed to get into the correct tunnel.

The next big obstacle will come on May 25, when the General Data Protection Regulation implementation is scheduled, a European law of great complexity and ambition that aims to give more control to people over their personal data, and force companies to offer very demanding privacy guarantees under penalty of up to 20 million euros for data leaks like the one we saw last month. This is an important step for Europe and it will be much more so if the giants of Silicon Valley agree on fulfilling the regulation. The U.S. administration suffers from a known allergy to this type of regulation, arguing that it slows down innovation.

The rest will depend on you and me, dear reader — on how much we care about our data and the sources we use to become informed.