Tools and Weapons: The Promise and The Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

In early 2016, we assembled a team with some of our best software architects. They had two years before the GDPR would take effect on May 25, 2018, but they had no time to spare. The architects needed first to turn to lawyers, who defined what the GDPR required. With the lawyers, they then created a specification that listed all the technology features our services would need to enable. The architects then crafted a new blueprint for the processing and storage of information that would apply to all our services and make these features effective. By the last week of August, the plan was ready for review at a meeting with Satya and the company’s senior leadership team. Everyone knew that the blueprint called for a massive amount of engineering work. We’d need to move more than three hundred engineers to work full-time on the project for at least eighteen months. And in the final six months before the GDPR implementation date, the number would swell into the thousands. It represented a financial commitment in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It was not a meeting that anyone wanted to miss. Some cut short their vacation to be there. The engineering and legal teams walked through the blueprint, timelines, and resource allocations. It impressed everyone. And in some ways, it surprised everyone. As the meeting progressed, Satya suddenly exclaimed with a bit of a chuckle, “Isn’t this great?” He continued, “For years it has been next to impossible to get all the engineers acros...