Facebook's Sandberg Gently Warns Europe About Privacy Rules
Concerned about privacy? Maybe you should be concernedabout the economy instead. That was the subtext of a keynote speech by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, at a technology conference in the heart of Europe on Tuesday.
Context & Ripple Effects
Sheryl Sandberg has spent two years building the public-facing half of Facebook's leadership: her 2010 argument that Facebook was displacing email framed the company as infrastructure rather than an app. The Davos-season keynote extends that framing into policy territory, arriving just as Facebook is widely reported to be preparing an initial public offering — unconfirmed, but circulating the same week — and as it forces its Timeline redesign on all users after giving them a week to clean up their profiles.
The speech leans on numbers Facebook itself commissioned: a claimed $15.3 billion in value added to the European economy and support for 230,000 jobs in 2011. That is the substance behind the 'gentle warning' — privacy rules recast not as a rights question but as an economic-growth question, made by a company whose valuation depends on data-driven advertising.
First-order effects
- European policymakers drafting privacy rules now face Facebook's economic counterweight directly: the company is arguing that restrictive rules would put claimed jobs and billions in measured value at risk, at the exact moment an IPO would make its valuation a matter of public record.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms get a ready-made lobbying template — commission an economic-impact study, then present regulation as a jobs issue — lowering the cost for every US internet company to contest EU privacy rulemaking on the same terms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, transatlantic privacy policy becomes a contest between regulators writing rules and platforms publishing GDP-style impact figures, with the terms of debate shifting from user consent to macroeconomic cost.
The trend: As consumer internet companies scale toward public markets, they increasingly answer regulatory pressure in Europe with commissioned economic-impact arguments rather than product concessions.