On 22 March 2026, I spoke with Jeffrey Snyder of Broadcast Retirement Network in an interview published on TheStreet. It picks up the thread of the commentary I wrote earlier this year, The Unfinished Fight for Data Protection.
The conversation starts from the same point as the piece: privacy is a right the international community recognized in 1948 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and one that is eroding in the digital world. We talked about what it takes to translate that legal commitment into technical terms, the work we are doing at ITU to build consensus among member states, and why embedding privacy in the design of technical standards matters once a principle has to reach emerging technologies like AI.
We also compared where governments stand. Europe, as a consumer rather than a producer of technology, has an obligation to build strong regulation, because foreign companies arrive with their own rules and the negotiation happens at a table you need to be sitting at. In the United States, there is still no federal law on privacy and data protection, which leaves much of the work to civil society organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I used the dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon over mass domestic surveillance as an example: in that case, the decision rested with the CEO of a technology company, which is not governance.
Data is not an abstract resource; it is an extension of who we are.
When Jeffrey asked what citizens can do, my answer was to go to their elected representatives. We already know how to regulate: it has been done for the tobacco industry, the fast food industry, and nuclear weapons. What is missing is political will, and that will has to come from citizens asking for better data protection and better privacy.
My thanks to Jeffrey Snyder and Broadcast Retirement Network for the invitation.
Original interview: TheStreet, “The Unfinished Fight for Data Protection,” 22 March 2026