Data privacy's conundrum in a global economy + 2025 business predictions

On innovation, forecasting the new year, and how employees adapt to the new normal

On Friday, Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan’s 3-hour podcast and I’ve been assimilating the interview over the course of a few days (taking 3 hours at a time isn’t a luxury I can usually afford).

Mark is a controversial figure - just like any other billionaire or successful founder. But someone running a “network of networks” with 3.5 billion daily users and over 4 billion monthly visitors, this represents the biggest digital consumer market in the world.

It’s a great show (catch it on Spotify or YouTube if you can), but I posted about one of the topics he brought up, namely the EU fining big tech over 30 billion dollars over the past decade. I made some suggestions or assumptions about data privacy - and got almost annihilated by European workers around data protection and adhering PII.

Controversial topics are one thing - and I know that privacy is one of them. But I’m fascinated by several things:

• I never said that privacy shouldn’t exist or it’s a bad thing or anything. The fact that Europeans defaulted to this assumption (dozens of them) was alarming.
• A reaction of this magnitude is generally a sign with a deeper psychological meaning. I’m not a therapist, but someone can probably track this down to early childhood or other trauma, complex, or underachieving at school, missing out on opportunities and choices, or anything else.
• It felt like most people were zealously protecting data privacy “at all cost.” Again, I’m not AGAINST privacy; I’d rather not deal with spam, cold emails and texts, robocalls, and other means of passing my data elsewhere. But as a technologist, I know very well how systems work, how many SaaS/pixels you need to integrate within a general system, and how most brands will die because of outdated feature set and boring functionalities if they have to drop everything passing data to 3rd parties, revert half the features, and run in the blind because of lacking events and GA4 data and what not.

Ole also published a viral thread around EU vs. US after I got mine live:

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