Ms Frances Haugen:

GDPR was a groundbreaking law. It changed how Silicon Valley operated. I remember working at Pinterest while GDPR was rolling out and I believe it was vitally important in having companies even just look at the data they were storing. Companies were not even aware of all the stuff they had on people, so GDPR is very important. However, the reality is that because Ireland is the regulatory hub for these large tech companies, it has been flooded with GDPR violation complaints. There are two problems. First, a very limited number of judgments have come out of those decisions and those judgments, as they have emerged, have been deeply criticised by other parties inside the European Union. Other parties are allowed to assess the judgments, confidentially, before they become public. Time and again countries such as Germany, Italy and France have come forward and said that given the amount of resources and time that were put into the investigations, not enough substance is coming out of them. Second, they are not coming out with enough teeth. I believe that having an effective regulator is very hard. I recognise that. It is very expensive and hard. It is something we are developing from scratch. It is similar to being in the 1970s and developing the first environmental protection authorities. I believe binding together is the way forward because each individual party in Europe is not going to be able to afford the number of algorithmic specialists, and there are just not a lot of them in the world. Until we begin training enough we cannot expect each country to have a tough enough enforcement.