Grading #128’s testimony predictions: 3-for-3, and I take no pleasure. (Some pleasure.)
The immortal soundbite arrived on schedule: Senator Hatch asked how Facebook sustains a business users don’t pay for, and Zuckerberg’s pause-then-“Senator, we run ads” is already a t-shirt. The stock rose ~4.5% DURING testimony, exactly as the survived-theater thesis predicted. And the legislative outlook remains a fog of task forces. But logging the less-memed substance, because it matters more: the hearings revealed a governance vacuum, not just a literacy gap — question after question circled “who audits the algorithm?” and the honest answer, from anyone, is currently “nobody with subpoena power and a compiler.” GDPR (my beat, #126) is the only concrete framework arriving this year, and it arrives from BRUSSELS. The US regulates its most powerful industry via the EU’s copy-paste. Strange timeline; load-bearing timeline.
Counterprogramming from the UK: TSB, a British bank, attempted a big-bang core-banking migration LAST WEEKEND and it is going catastrophically — millions locked out of accounts, people seeing OTHER customers’ balances, day nine and counting. A full entry’s worth next fortnight as details emerge, but the early shape is every migration sin this blog has cataloged (big-bang cutover, no rollback, victory declared at 99% — #100’s clause) performed with a NATION’S BANK ACCOUNTS. The healthcare.gov of banking (#019), with compounding interest.
TIL: our GDPR deletion pipeline passed its first end-to-end test — a synthetic user, forgotten, verifiably, across all forty-three stores in under 24 hours. Six weeks to deadline. The lawyers’ forcing function (#121) has produced the best infrastructure work of my year, a sentence I’ll be unpacking with a therapist or a keynote eventually.