When the executives reviewed the list of what they could no longer keep, they warned the EU representatives that this was just the kind of data—phone numbers and IP addresses—that had enabled them to help the police track down the Paris attackers. If they could not retain it, they could not help when the next attack happened. “They didn’t care,” one of the Facebook executives told me. “They said that’s a problem for the intelligence agencies, not the regulators. And the two clearly weren’t talking to each other.”
