Hi there, welcome back. It's a new year and a return to MLEX's regular weekly podcast. My name is James Panicki, coming to you from the MLEX offices in Melbourne, Australia.

I hope you're well, wherever you may be listening to us this year.

There is plenty of colour and movement likely to be unleashed over the next 11 or so months.

Lots of big stories for us to follow in 2023, so we're expecting it to be quite a ride.

Speaking of, meta-platforms, the social media giant, is going to have to fork out

not millions, but billions of dollars in fines and lawsuit settlements over the course of the year,

and more importantly, it's facing what will be the most significant challenge to its business model ever.

Why is that? Well, it's all about

the rivers of gold, the data that companies like Meta's Facebook are able to hoover up and

monetize. It's not that those rivers are about to dry up, but regulators are certainly

starting to turn the taps. It's a kind of big picture story that requires a forward-looking

piece of analysis written from both sides of the Atlantic, and what are the chances? That's

exactly what our reporters Mike Swift and Sam Clark have provided us with. Mike is Emlex's chief

global digital risk correspondent based in San Francisco.

Sam Clark is our London-based correspondent covering data privacy and security in Ireland and the UK.

And both of them are with me right now.

So let's start from the US.

Mike Meta's $725 million settlement over data sharing with apps is the largest data protection litigation settlement in U.S. history.

And so, well, I mean, let's start by talking about that.

Why was it so large?

And how does it reflect U.S. data protection litigation trends?

Yeah, it's a lot of money, isn't it?

...