A delegation of American MPs will go to Switzerland to discuss Libra with the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Information.
This was made public by the website NZZ am Sonntag, which reports that in the next few days a delegation of six members of the US House Committee on Financial Services will travel to Switzerland to meet Adrian Lobsiger in order to discuss the Libra project.
In fact, the Libra Association is based in Geneva, so the Swiss Commissioner Lobsiger is the appropriate interlocutor with whom to discuss issues related to privacy and data protection.
One of the critical points of the Facebook stablecoin project is precisely that linked to the amount of data that will inevitably be collected by the companies that will manage the transactions, and this is the issue the House Committee intends to investigate.
The delegation will be led by the democratic Maxine Waters, president of the Financial Services Commission and one of the main opponents of the Facebook project.
On July 23rd, Commissioner Lobsiger said about Libra that, although he had sent a request for some information to the Libra Association, they never replied. Lobsiger also stated that his office expected an assessment of the project’s impact on data protection risks and the proposal of appropriate countermeasures.
The assurances given by the Libra project director, David Marcus, in this regard are not convincing, as at present they are only promises. Moreover, due to the obligation to comply with anti-money laundering regulations, it will be absolutely inevitable that operators of Libra wallets request identity verification from all their customers. Considering that one of these companies (Calibra) is controlled by Facebook, concerns about an excess of power concentration due to the collection of a large amount of data are legitimate.
