whatever it takes police and i'm following w. fire made for minds amenable girls. it's hard for me to explain to a german the beauty of digitization because they haven't experienced the benefits abroad causal i find it absolutely crucial. didn't i say sion happens? it will continue. but it's now that as democracies, we can say we are going to set the direction the compton is a closed, you don't know was, was you chance? oh, we're not slaves where walk us crystal allen is she see dr. low? it all by this. so europe is sandwich between the u. s. and china sandrica. i needed to free itself if it wants to avoid becoming a digital colony now that it will be a colonial negative. ah ah. our lifestyles are rapidly changing. friends, work, business transactions, all walks of life are permeated by digital transformation. and since the cove it pandemic, this process has accelerated. the digital economy is growing 7 times as quickly as the rest of the economy. it's our future, like it or not. there are real opportunities, but the dangers should not be underestimated. so far, europe has not produced any big i t enterprise of its own. the question now is, can we catch up and finally take our digital future into our own hands. zanfeld sebastian, after a separation, i decided to give it a go. suddenly, you're confronted with all kinds of questions. what do i with eel? how do i present myself? what impression do i want to convey it was so difficult to put together this profile case for him to stop iraq? 5, you know, the city was pretty new to me and i wanted to get to know new people been and i, it is. i'm not the kind to lock up to a stranger and a bar and say hi there. how's it going to gets? yeah. try it is, i mean keep like come through a difficult separation of my friends, told me i should get back to living my life in click swipe type. we love our smartphone apps and they are increasingly shaping our daily lives. dating platforms are extremely popular. every tense european uses at least one ivy, which eula, i felt something even at the messaging stage. and that was just confirmed when we met in person. yes, there was a connection there right away. i shouldn't i think i liked the way you were. you wrote an answer to it's pretty light and easy for there was like hours work in a copy. i don't think we would have met without the app or 90 and how did you decide to leave the app after you met? we decided that we would be exclusive and i one point i think one evening we just sent. yeah, we haven't used it for like a month or something. so it's, let's just deleted it and that was it and of it. okay. but you can print out true. yeah. to give it. yeah. because if you leave it, it's probably, you know, like somewhere on a server, but you don't have access to it. and so yeah, we did, decided to the screenshots of all the messages we had sent each other before we met physically. it's kind of our history here. yeah. yeah. are you aware of your personal data rights? absolutely not on my side, long. not at all. and you absolutely not. and you get because one aspect is that so you can, you can request your data to platform liked in there or okay. cupid, even if you deleted the app, even if you did it, they save it for some time few months. yep. so in terms of data protection, there are several problems with dating apps, uncle, for instance, none know very few of these outs verify a person's identity, but we're basically we're leaning ourselves to strangers and giving them personal sensitive data without knowing who is actually on the other end here, the load, good did i mention? i have already had an experience where one of the photos i've shared with someone has recycled back to me through somebody else. and i've said to some one other social in photo of me, but like, i'm not identifiable by, i knew i took the photo. so i think privacy is a huge issue. my safety roles that yeah, i keep my face kind of separate from my sexually explicit material, just in case someone decided to put it on a ball graham and then you're out there forever lit up to get on the whole dancing apps have become ideal sites to connect to the kind of personal information that can't be found elsewhere, including details like h, i v status and sexual orientation, says obama. so this information is sold to 3rd parties and we can no longer see where such nature is stored and what happens to a comedies holiday season. dates, food orders, work transactions, data is the fuel that feeds the digital transport network. nothing works without it . so what happens with all this data? it doesn't just fly through the air, but it does speed through under water cables. $450.00 cables in total run along the ocean, floors digital highways connect to europe with the u. s, especially. but also with the rest of the world with and our likes, posts and online purchases are transmitted through digital highways like these. they are distributed at internet hubs and stored in thousands of data centers like this one. our simple swipes and taps are enabled by a gigantic behind the scenes infrastructure. was locked into net. well, when you have internet, you tend to think of one big network. but in reality, there are 55000 individual networks internet. that's why internet exchange points, as they're known, it's have been incorporated into the concept of the internet to link up the networks at the various sentences. amans of one of the biggest internet exchange points in europe di kicks is located in frankfurt, a mayan in one of these top security computing centers. from canada. she knows anovia ham switchover. before we don't have a computer, we have switching sunday switches, arbitrate traffic exchange between different matlock, followed to much easier to continue. the process is fully automated, of course and takes place at break neck speed. mom was at his exchange points hard, so tar days. you have to think of these exchange points as international. the traffic is international, went vignettes, him on it. if someone from italy wants to send an email to russia was he will probably send it from italy from to d. kicks you to under russian provider will pick it up at d, kicks and deliver it to vladivostok or wherever leave. what does the not allowed to do was talk would owe him an incredible network, a work in constant progress. it's the base is for all our activities in the digital world. but europe has a problem. most of the data is stored in processed by tech corporations from the u . s. and transparency is not their middle name. cloud storage is inaccessible. we don't know what happens to the collected information. when you enter data on a website, you relinquish control over it. enterprises can do pretty much what they want with it. it's not uncommon for them to create virtual profiles of us. what we do consume think and we're not being screened, just for fun. the goal is to predict and influence our decisions. even our political opinions so called micro targeting is routine tech companies do everything they can to make us feel at home on the internet. but actually, behind the scenes, it's still the wild west, and the law of the strongest, prevails. at times, this can have extremely destabilizing effects. we want to put undergo vegetable very lumps. i read the thought to, i'll never forget one of the 1st articles that worked. it got a huge number of shares and like upload it was on the lines of amazing. this plant can cure everything, confirmed my doctors, something like that will clear. hello. oh, in 24 hours i made $4500.00 euro. who should very, i thought, well, i can do this for the rest of my life wrinkle boy was a little the home tells you the business of misinformation has long taken root in europe. most click batters are located in the western balkans, especially in north macedonia. lacking better job prospects, young qualified web designers earn a living by baking web content. as soon as this is clicked on money flows, fake news is a lucrative business or post the pictures that we're for, we'll follow bullock half an hour of work per day is equivalent to $10.00 north macedonian average salaries to the bushes. if that is the thing meant and there's an interesting story about this level. got started as a job level of thought. yeah. but we wrote an article about obama's daughter being hit by a car all but the article went viral. viola dollar slightly mimic human, brought in. that's when we realized we could do more than publish completely and verified news about health and beauty of thought underneath between inappropriate any misty or us where at the law. so we started selling ad time on our pages or the up or down us look, look in the song and we stopped checking with the post whereabout at the upholstery . if you paid for the slot, we shared the post or a loop shuttle to do. the us market was where the macedonian click batters made their big money. with fake news on facebook and google, they share responsibility for an historic turning point. the 2016 us selection. good look where so you measure will double the rhetoric of these posts was mainly pro republican on silicone figures. purple my is that a problem or booklet? by sharing this content with a large audience, we indirectly influence the outcome of the 2016 election when trump was elected president of the united states of america. oh, he's been resolved them. of what barbara will believe his will. google and facebook were under a lot of pressure, especially from the american governmental school journals. i knew about the propaganda on social media, but they didn't stop us at the time from it's funny. they should have just pulled the plug. funner really to play will follow all the blood the prince of adult from. ah, it took them almost 7 months after trump was elected president, me to shut down all our pages and advertising accounts and so on. when you go for the bedroom. so dad are gone to the garden in a small eastern european town, a group of young men influenced the united states election. this is very less infamously known as the fake news capital of the world. and we now know it wasn't just the u. s. election that was undermined by fake news rags it. and the 2017 presidential election in france were also affected. so far, state institutions have found it pretty much impossible to take action against it. corporations like facebook act, like independent states, doing only their own internal regulations. there are numerous social media platforms, but the global supremacy of facebook. now meta is overwhelming. giant corporate bulldozers are also found an e commerce. basically the giant's reigned supreme in almost all digital areas. a few u. s. corporations have built the digital infrastructure of the 21st century and dominate it. so should we in europe simply resign ourselves to eternal dependence on these corporations? or can we find alternatives? the commission has decided to find google. i $2400000.00 euros, and a european union has hit google with a record fine equal to $5000000000.00 media doodles. google 2015. an important step on the road to independence. the e, you declared war and the monopolies of individual tech giants, the 1st public institution in the world to do so. apple, unless we cover up to 13000000000 euros in unpaid text, the e u has set out to curb the dominance of individual market players to give citizens more control over their own data and to hold social media accountable for publishing, fake or harmful content. what is happening right now is that democracy takes back sort of control of the essentials for a very long time, really essential decisions have been taken enclosed boardrooms. i'm not in our democracy. and that is not to exclude the commercial side of technology, but that is to say that it's that 100 percent legitimate, that it is our elected representatives. ah, who sets the direction and in our society's it's hard to imagine the huge tech corporations backing down. they have a powerful lobby that spends 100000000 euros annually to influence political decisions to their advantage. a large part of this sum comes from the u. s. the e u is currently working on to groundbreaking legislative packages. once passed, it will be possible to combat fake news and illegal content more effectively. and companies will have to be more transparent about their internal algorithms. but that's not all. we now in the process of a piece of legislation called the didn't don't mock its act. that will oblige those who hold significant market power to some degree to hold back. right now we have an amazon case which is exactly on this, that you are a small merchant on the amazon market place. it's really difficult to get your own data to get to know what your customers like, but amazon retail, they get all your data, no, what you sell and what you don't sell so that they can compete against you. so, so that kind of seemingly quite simple things that you can get your own data should be a positive result of what we're doing right now. but our fines and regulations enough. how does europe compare to the rest of the world in relation to tech companies and infrastructure? not well at all. 75 percent of the capital value of all data platform companies lies in american hands. china can claim about 20 percent. while europe sheer is a mere 4 percent, that's a serious problem. so why hasn't europe produced anything comparable to google or microsoft? i think the reason why europe has not fostered these giant companies was mistakes that we made maybe a decade ago. because if you want to scale a company, you need a big market. and if you want to scale a company, you need a lot of risk willing capital. and neither of those 2 things were provide at 10 years ago in europe. where in the us you would have and very unify digital single markets to languages, english, american and spanish. and you would have a capital markets where ah, capital would come with competence. mm . with, but europe is beginning to gain ground. there is a lot of investment in the startup sector, especially from the european investment bank. mm. stockholm could serve as a model. the swedish capital has a successful startup and investor seen. this is mainly due to spotify. the music platform founded here. sophia bents was part of the core spotify team when the company was launched back at a time and i joined spotify. how we got to meet interesting people? was that of a host that friday bears that our office that i think was the embryo of the kind of stuck on texting at that time for us at least, but no conferences and no me wps and no co working space. this a no accelerator said no hobbs to day. sophia bents works for cherry ventures, a venture capital fund as the v, c u r on the lookout for the next big tech company. the fund i worked for, we invest primarily in the european startups. when you work at a pick start up and you want to launch in europe, of course it's a bit of a challenge because it's very different depending on if you're rolling out a product and spin or in germany or in norway. so for me, at my years, at 45, we were launching in in a number of markets. we learned a lot and i felt like after having launched into european markets, we had gained so much little insights and learned that the us launch was of course, you know, a big chunk of work and not easy. but we were better equipped to do it because we had launched in europe before concerning the connection fill out from among the founders. when i joined fi, i was 25 and i didn't have anyone to bounce ideas, food and i didn't have someone around that have done a similar journey. and i wish that i would have had that. so i'm passionate about giving that to the founders that i invest in them. i mean, talk to in a little bigger that the culture which fortify, i think, one of the key reasons why, you know, what if i became so big is because the founders, they were determined to build a big company and not sell too early. and i'm really impressed with how they have been so keen to really make it a massive company coming from europe. the effect that has on the ecosystem in general is incredibly inspiring. there's a lot of companies being started every 2nd. i feel like and every 2nd basement, there's some new founder creating a new company. i think that's, that's the thing. and it shows, by example, that it can be done. there's no excuse to day 20 times more money is invested in european startups than 12 years ago. but it's still a pittance in comparison to funding in the us and funding is only one of the challenges. if europe wants to be more digitally independent, it needs to solve another problem. microchips, nothing works without them. but only 10 percent of micro chips are manufactured in europe. the bulk is imported from asia. here's where history takes an interesting turn. this is where the socialist government of the ged are produced, their 1st micro chips. and this is where europe might actually catch up. dressed in those in the lines i stood in 1961 that's just over 60 years ago for a microelectronics institute was set up here is under. so you have a technical university working in the field. and that's 3rd, the development of numerous industries. even after the political changes of sports and clever economic policy in the region as ensure the survival and further development of this no house, no since russian dresden is now the largest microelectronics center in europe. and that includes the entire ecosystem needed for a high tech industry like microelectronics. it's our silicon saxony, like silicon valley in california to him from silicon valley in california. the sonoma found was moving so that amounts to about $70000.00 jobs in the dresden area in the broad microelectronic sector. this is sure the potential is amendments is was political the digital transformation poses gigantic challenges to the european economy. production processes are increasingly digitalized and interconnected. this means secure data exchange is paramount, but currently it's far from acceptable. european industry has taken action. oh, boy, francesca of bon fios goal is visionary. he is the managing director of gaia x, one of the most daring projects and digital infrastructures. he's planning to build a european infrastructure that will enable secure exchanges between diverse industries and producers. 324 of the continents. most important enterprises are already on board. as our 14 national centers stan marquelle, swindle soft turkey. but a method you, anita, he got caught up to worry. we're currently designing software to connect existing computers, data centers and cloud as the software will run on the infrastructure that's already present in the leading. i'll rules will identify those wishing to gain access to the data at the so we moved from relinquishing control of our data to others, to controlling our own data control. they go to that to understand what secure data exchange could mean for us in the future. let's take an example from the tourist industry. think of a person traveling through different countries using different means of transport. in the future, one single payment $1.00 check in one id check will suffice for the entire journey . the travel agencies, airline companies, and border controls, will all be using a common platform at the beginning of the journey. however, the traveller will have to consent to access to their data. guy x for their part will guarantee secure data exchange with their block chain technology. every single access and every alteration will be transparent. europe's economy is still not in the same league as the u. s. and china in relation to digitalization. according to e, u estimates europe would have to invest 1250000000000 euros over the next decade to be competitive but at least with its reconstruction fund, the e. u has covered a 10th of that amount. some regents