Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

Global data flows are being framed here as a bargain, not a miracle: if you want the economic and political upside of exchanging information across borders, you also inherit the obligation to protect the people inside that data. De Vries’s “must” is the tell. This isn’t advice; it’s an attempt to lock a policy premise in place before the next crisis or trade negotiation tries to wriggle out of it.

The coin metaphor does quiet work. It makes “exchange” and “protection” feel inseparable and value-neutral, as if privacy safeguards are simply the natural shadow cast by connectivity. That’s strategic, because the real debate in international politics is rarely about whether data should move; it’s about whose rules govern that movement. By insisting these are two sides of the same coin, De Vries pre-empts the familiar argument that security, innovation, or commerce require loosening constraints. He reframes protection as the price of legitimacy: without it, cross-border exchange becomes extraction.

The subtext is European and post-9/11: the tension between counterterrorism cooperation, corporate data appetite, and civil liberties. A Dutch/EU politician speaking in this register is also gesturing toward the EU’s preferred model of “rights-compatible” globalization, where trust is an infrastructure, not a vibe. Strengthening data protection is less about moral purity than about maintaining consent in democracies. If citizens think international sharing equals surveillance or misuse, the political mandate for sharing collapses. The coin isn’t just rhetorical; it’s a warning about what happens when one side is minted and the other gets shaved off.