If Zuckerberg's testimony proves anything, it's that Western societies have very different privacy standards to each other

Mark Zuckerberg scored a considerable success with his testimony to the US Senate. That is not a personal view, though I was impressed at how a 33-year-old could handle the quizzing by experienced (if not very tech-savvy) politicians. It is simply the view of the financial markets. Facebook shares rose 4.5 per cent on the day, mostly after he started giving evidence. Apparently, thanks to the rise in the share price, he ended up the day $3bn richer. Writing ahead of his speaking to the House, we’ll see whether this progress can be maintained. In Europe the response was less positive, or at least the political response was. Look at this report from Bloomberg...

“German justice minister Katarina Barley was critical of the CEO. She took to Twitter citing Zuckerberg’s pledge that he would accept responsibility for his company’s failures, saying that ‘apparently this hasn’t been that important until now. Facebook must finally protect the privacy of millions of people. It’s good that we have stringent rules in the European Union. Whoever breaks those will feel the consequences’.”

Well, yes. European privacy regulation is indeed more strict than in the US – a point that came up in the Senate session – and it may well be that EU regulation may become a model for the United States. But consider two things.

First, European attitudes to privacy are different to American, and Britain is different again. In some ways they are more stringent, but on others less so. Take personal identity. In the US and most of Europe you have an ID card on you. In the UK we don’t. But in Britain we have every move we make watched on closed circuit TV. Americans are horrified by that. In Norway everyone’s tax return is available online. You can see exactly how much your colleagues earn. That would horrify most Britons – and as we have seen from the BBC, when some salaries are disclosed it leads to interesting conversations.

Look wider. Should people’s criminal records be available forever, or should they be expunged after a certain period? Should there be a national DNA database? India is building one for its 1.3 billion citizens, a stunningly ambitious project. Should German car diesel emission standards be lower than American, as they in practice are?

My point is simply that different societies have different standards, and must be allowed to have them. It is arrogant to assume that one is better or worse than another. But if a multinational wishes to operate globally, it has to follow whatever the local standards happen to be.

Now, to the second point raised by Katarina Barley’s intervention. The report says: “She took to Twitter….”

Huh? What’s this? A senior German minister, supported by all the resources of the German state, does not use the normal official channels to put out her views. Her office does not put out a statement. She does not make a speech to constituents. She does not call a press conference for the German or international media. She goes to a foreign social network much used (some might say abused) by the current US president. Moreover, this is a network that is delivered free to anyone in Germany who wants to use it – she does not even pay for it.

If you stand back and think about it, it is really astounding. A tiny handful of American companies dominate the fastest-growing area of economic activity in the world. There are 2.2 billion users of Facebook, for heaven’s sake. The only significant global networks that are not American are Chinese, and they are basically clones of their US pioneers. Actually, I think Donald Trump is quite right when he accuses China of stealing US intellectual property, but the bigger point here is that American enterprise has given the world a technology that it clearly relishes. Otherwise, a German minister would not have used it to make that statement.

That leads to what seems to me to be the biggest question of all: how has the United States done this?

Think of other technologies. The car was invented in Germany but production spread quickly round the world; the in the US but technical development came initially mostly from France; television in the UK but manufacturing moved just about everywhere. But not only are the social networks American. The software on which they are based – Windows, Apple, Android, etc – are American too.

We are too close to be able to do more than glimpse the answer but I think it has two main strands.

One is education, and in particular the openness of US higher education to foreign talent. It is not just that Facebook started at Harvard, or that Sergey Brin was born in Russia – or for that matter that Steve Jobs’s biological father was Syrian. It is that the US remains not only the greatest magnet for global talent, but also the greatest developer, promoter and fosterer of talent.

The other is the way education interacts with entrepreneurship. Writing from a British perspective, the UK is the only other country in the world with universities in the top 10. On the QS ranking we have four, Cambridge, Oxford, UCL and Imperial, which ain’t bad. But we don’t seem to have US entrepreneurial zeal. We can create great technologies – DNA profiling , CT scanners, IVF – but we rarely capitalise on our inventiveness. Europe isn’t in the game. On QS the top French university is ranked 43rd, the top German is 64th, and the top Italian 170th.

And there’s the challenge. Europeans are sometimes sniffy about American technology, social attitudes and financial values. But we can’t create a Facebook, and a German minister delights in using Twitter.