Big Tech defector Niamh Sweeney may be a vital asset for Data Protection Commission
Niamh Sweeney heading into an Oireachtas committee hearing in 2018 when she was head of public policy for Facebook Ireland (now Meta).
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has submitted a formal complaint to the European Commission regarding the appointment of a former public policy director at Meta as one of Ireland’s new data protection commissioners.
The ICCL has expressed “outrage” over Niamh Sweeney’s appointment, claiming that her previous role, in which she lobbied on behalf of Meta, precludes her from the impartiality and independence which the role of commissioner requires.
But insisting that regulators should not have a background working for a technology company undermines the ability for legislators to understand how Big Tech operates, how it lobbies, and how it approaches and attempts to circumnavigate the rules that govern it.
For an alternative view, see Data Protection Commission beware: Poachers aren't always the best gamekeepers
I knew Niamh during my nine-year tenure at Facebook, now Meta. She was smart and fiery; I admired her and was maybe a little afraid of her.
Working in political ads, I was impressed by her professional background, as a former special adviser to Eamon Gilmore in the office of the Tánaiste.
I recall Niamh rolling her eyes as she explained the Good Friday Agreement in a call to engineers in Silicon Valley who couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of transnational government bodies and political parties: Conflict resolution legislation “didn’t scale”.
Our first work on a project together was an event for Women for Election, the nonprofit organisation aiming to get more women elected into Irish public office; Facebook — Niamh and I — wanted to help.
But, for all Niamh’s public service credentials, her role at Facebook was essentially to be a lobbyist — to try to persuade legislators against tighter regulation.
And here’s the real flaw in ICCL’s logic: It is the failure of regulators and legislators to adequately understand how the tech sector plays which has caused such mediocre regulation to date.
Rather than reject Big Tech defectors over fears of their partiality, the DPC, the European Commission, and national governments need more insiders to switch sides, if they are going to do a better job of resisting the lobbyists and regulating the industry.
There is an inherent technical and cultural gap between the ways that government legislators operate versus companies like Meta.
Regulation needs to be thoughtful, considered, and detailed.
Big Tech moves fast and breaks things.
Regulators such as the Data Protection Commission see themselves as protectors of individual and societal interests such as privacy.
Companies like Meta see the public’s willingness to trade privacy for price: When Facebook rolled out a paid alternative to its platform for people who wanted to opt out of targeted advertising, the uptake was minimal.
The data proves that the public prefer free social media platforms and targeted ads which show them stuff they want to buy.
The tech industry considers itself always to be that bit smarter and more capable than public servants, especially in the Trump era of Zuckerberg’s “masculine energy”.
Observe Elon Musk in Doge, or John Collison in last week: The tech bros are quite sure they know how to ‘do’ government better than the civil servants.
The truth is that much of the Irish public would indeed like to see more tech-style growth and efficiency in government operations; if we had more tech defectors working in public service, perhaps we could sidestep the chainsaws and Maga caps.
Some of the recent tech regulation from Europe has felt so massively out of step with the true challenges in the industry and society that it suggests a total lack of tech-side understanding. The EU’s transparency and targeting of political advertising regulation (TTPA) has been greeted by almost all of us working in the sector as a step backwards — resulting in fewer transparency tools than existed previously and driving ‘dark money’ ads underground.
MEPs’ recent discussion of the TTPA focused on Cambridge Analytica’s micro-targeting campaigns and the role of Facebook in the attacks on the Rohingya in Myanmar. But this is legislating for tech failures from a decade ago, many already obsolete, which the commission is only catching up on now.
Meanwhile, the threats to individuals and society today, such as those from deceptive artificial intelligence (AI) in social media, remain unregulated.
How long before adequate legislation can pursue those behind the deepfake video falsely purporting to show Catherine Connolly withdrawing from the presidential election in the final week of the campaign — which could have destabilised that election?
I am a Big Tech defector. Half of my career was spent working for Big Tech, first at Google and then Meta; the other half trying to atone for my sense of guilt.
Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book, 'Careless People', the memoir of another ex-Meta public policy manager, shows I’m not the only ex-Facebooker trying to scrub the damned spot out from our hands ever since.
I can’t speak to Niamh Sweeney’s experiences at Meta, nor do I know how she now feels about her former employer.
I do know that, before Meta, she was a public servant and she understands how government works. She also knows how Big Tech works, how the tech bros in Ireland and abroad think (or don’t think) and which weak points in regulatory practices she, in her previous role, once may have sought to exploit.
Meta hired the former adviser to the tánaiste, Niamh Sweeney, long before hiring former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg but, in both instances, the opportunity lay in recruiting someone from “the other side”, to help the company deal better with governments.
If regulators demand origin purity tests — that their staff must never have slept with the enemy — they are handing a singular advantage to the tech firms, who will have no such inhibitions in seducing public servants over to their side.
In bringing Niamh Sweeney to the Data Protection Commissioner’s office, Irish legislators gain a “double agent” — someone who has worked both sides and is fluent in both government and tech languages.
Now the pressure will be on Sweeney to show her teeth and prove whose side she’s on — whether her insider perspective, matched with her smarts and her fieriness, will allow her to move fast and break the tech broligarchy.
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