Hello and welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm Sam Wilkin, Brussels news editor, and today we're going to talk about big tech after several big beasts, including Apple's Tim Cook, came to a conference here last week to talk about GDPR and the need for US regulation.

We've been watching it closely, as well as our Brussels tech reporter, Cynthia Croutts.

Vesla Dicava came over from London and Amy Miller came from San Francisco.

Amy and Cynthia are here with me now. Hello.

Hi. Hi.

Cynthia, first of all, tell us why this conference is so important.

Well, yes, this is an annual conference of privacy commissioners, which just happened to be in Brussels this year.

There were about 1,400 delegates gathered in both Brussels and Sofia, so it's quite a big number.

And at the same time, it came as GDPR, the European

data protection rules, came into force five months ago. So it was quite an important moment,

the first time that they all gathered after this took effect. And Amy, we saw some big fish

from California making appearance for the first time, mentioned Apple's Tim Cook already.

Who else was there?

And does this mean they're taking things more seriously now than they were in the past?

Yeah, in addition to Cook, there was Google's Sundar Pichai and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

And, yeah, I think it does mean they're taking EU regulations more seriously than before.

I've covered privacy conferences for years, and this is the first time I've seen CEOs show up at a privacy conference,

even if just by video messaging.

So, yeah, I think it's definitely a signal that privacy has become top on their minds.

Yeah, now Zuckerberg and Pichai sort of send video messages, is that right?

That's right.

Tim Cook actually came in person, which, have we ever had that before?

...