{"id":19921,"date":"2019-06-19T20:20:15","date_gmt":"2019-06-19T20:20:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ci027cfe6650102697"},"modified":"2025-01-27T21:49:27","modified_gmt":"2025-01-27T21:49:27","slug":"regulators-are-already-breathing-down-facebooks-neck-over-libra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/business\/regulators-are-already-breathing-down-facebooks-neck-over-libra","title":{"rendered":"Regulators Are Already Breathing Down Facebook\u2019s Neck Over Libra"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s barely been a day since the libra<\/a> white paper was released and regulators are already taking aim at Facebook\u2019s new digital currency.<\/p>\n

International Reaction to Facebook\u2019s Libra<\/h3>\n

Officials in Europe didn\u2019t waste any time chiming in<\/a> on the announcement. While the crypto industry and everyone else were still collecting themselves, political leaders from France, England, the U.S. and Germany reacted to the news with a mixture of skepticism and caution. One has even gone as far as to ask Facebook to cease development so regulators can play catch up to evaluate it.<\/p>\n

Bruno Le Maire, France\u2019s minister of finance, for example, displayed some anxiety-laced agency. He told Europe 1 radio<\/a> that libra cannot \u201cbecome a sovereign currency.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is out of the question \u2026 It can\u2019t and must not happen,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Le Maire went on to request that central bank governors for the Group of Seven (the U.S., U.K., Canada, Italy, Spain, France and Japan) collaborate to prepare a report for its July 2019 summit. <\/p>\n

Marcus Faber, a German representative on the European Parliament, echoed these calls to action. He told regulators that they need to be vigilant in their scrutiny of what amounts to a \u201cshadow bank.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others were less keen to raise the alarm while still being prudent, namely, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney. Speaking at the European Central Bank\u2019s yearly meeting in Portugal, he advocated approaching libra with \u201can open mind\u201d but not so open that the project isn\u2019t subject to \u201ccoordinated\u201d regulatory constraints.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnything that works in this world will become instantly systemic and will have to be subject to the highest standards of regulation,\u201d Carney said, per Bloomberg<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Trusting Facebook With More Data Raises Concerns<\/h3>\n

In the United States, Representative and House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters made it known<\/a> that she thinks libra is a privacy hazard. <\/p>\n

\u201cWith the announcement that it plans to create a cryptocurrency, Facebook is continuing its unchecked expansion and extending its reach into the lives of its users,” she said in a statement on Tuesday. She added that Facebook \u201chas repeatedly shown a disregard for the protection and careful use of this data.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGiven the company\u2019s troubled past, I am requesting that Facebook agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on developing a cryptocurrency until Congress and regulators have the opportunity to examine these issues and take action,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, she hoped the announcement would be a \u201cwakeup call [for regulators] to get serious about the privacy and national security concerns\u201d cryptocurrencies pose, as no clear regulations and investor protections currently exist. Other congressional members share Waters\u2019s concerns. Republican Representative Patrick McHenry wrote in a letter to Waters, stating that Congress \u201cneed[s] to go beyond the rumors and speculations and provide a forum to assess this project and its potential unprecedented impact on the global financial system. Rep. McHenry proposes that Congress hold a hearing on libra, a process which Mark Zuckerberg knows all too well<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Democratic Senator Sharrod Brown also expressed his reservations<\/a>, stating that \u201cFacebook is already too big and too powerful, and it has used that power to exploit users\u2019 data without protecting their privacy.\u201d <\/p>\n

The common concern here is Facebook\u2019s tainted track record<\/a> for grossly irresponsible (and arguably unethical) management of user data. Both the libra white paper and its project head, David Marcus, have emphatically expressed that private Facebook user data and financial data will not intersect, but U.S. politicians appear unconvinced.<\/p>\n

France\u2019s Le Maire said that libra will allow Facebook to amass even more data. This financial and digital panopticon aside, Le Maire also expressed concerns over money laundering and terrorist financing, a curious concern given that such actions would be much less feasible on a permissioned, censorship-susceptible network like Libra than on a permissionless network like Bitcoin. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Regulators have begun raising concerns over Facebook\u2019s libra digital currency. How will the social media behemoth react?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2566,"featured_media":19906,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[3376,1479,1482,1820,73],"class_list":{"0":"post-19921","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-bruno-le-maire","9":"tag-facebook","10":"tag-libra","11":"tag-personal-data","12":"tag-privacy"},"author_data":{"id":2566,"name":"Colin Harper","nicename":"colin-harper","avatar_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MjEwMTYzMzc3Njg5ODYzNjQ2-96x96.webp"},"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/libra.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}