Switzerland surprised to hear it will be regulating Facebook's cryptocurrency

In a testimony before the US Senate Facebook indicated its Libra cryptocurrency will run from Switzerland, but it forgot to ask the Swiss if that was OK.

David Marcus, who is heading up Libra on Facebook’s behalf, testified before the US Senate Banking Committee in response to profound alarm from US lawmakers at the prospect of the social media giant developing its own currency. According to CNBC he said the data and privacy regulation of the currency will be overseen by a Swiss agency, as that’s where Libra will be based, but they say that’s the first they’ve heard of it.

In his testimony, which you can watch in full here if that’s your thing, Marcus said the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) will keep an eye on the data protection side of things, which must have only offered partial reassurance to US senators worried their citizens were vulnerable to having their data exploited yet again.

Imagine their horror, then, when they read the CNBC report and learned that Facebook and its Libra pals haven’t even made contact with the FDPIC yet. This failing, later confirmed by Facebook itself, it just the latest slip-up in what has been a frankly shambolic launch. You’d think Facebook would have dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t’ before unveiling a grand plan to revolutionise the global banking system and its failure to even check in with one of the proposed regulators it just embarrassing.

As TechCrunch notes, the data privacy side of all this is arguably the greatest concern as there will apparently be little control over developers that use the platform. Given the negative consequences of a fairly minor misuse of Facebook user data by Cambridge Analytica it’s baffling to see Facebook be so cavalier about this. The likelihood of Libra ever being set free is, on balance, increasingly small.