Dear Editor, Clash of the Titans in San Marino. «Who is this Italian? Can’t we just ban her?” This is the question that Mark Zuckerberg, the web tycoon, to ease the tension seems to have asked his aggressive pool of lawyers on the judge who will have to rule on the future of his social empire.

This is Valeria Pierfelici, a 61-year-old magistrate with a long experience, currently in service at the Court of the Republic of San Marino as well as a professor of civil law and commercial law, also specializing in Strasbourg. Appointed by the San Marino Judicial Council, a sort of our CSM, as appellate judge in an apparently minor proceeding, which however risks overwhelming the American digital giant.

Pierfelici, a veritable “black beast” of the politics of the oldest Republic in the world which has repeatedly tried in vain to unseat her, will in fact have to decide on December 14 whether to confirm the sentence to pay 4 million euros to Meta, the new name of the group in which Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other tech companies converge. She figures that she alone represents less than a handful of peanuts to Mr. Z, but that she risks becoming the trailblazer for billion-dollar lawsuits.

It all started in 2019, after the hacking episodes that affected Facebook on a global scale, when millions of social users found themselves published on the web, and accessible to “anyone”, their private data (telephone numbers , e-mail and home addresses, date of birth) stolen by criminals through “scraping”, a computer technique for the exfiltration of personal data from a website by means of an application. The multiple reports received, even from three Secretaries of State whose cell phone number was given, led the San Marino Privacy Authority to open an investigation which then ended with the sanction against Facebook for violating the article 33 of Law 171/2018 – adopted by San Marino to keep up with the EU Regulation on the GDPR – due to lack of adequate security measures for the personal data of San Marino users. «Facebook Ireland Ltd» and «Facebook Inc», respectively the Irish branch and the American parent company, born Meta, which has been engaged in a slow transition into the metaverse for a year, have been sanctioned.

Four million euros is certainly not an amount that, even after the 30% collapse on the stock market, could worry Mark Zuckerberg’s balance sheet. However, there are fears that the measure could set a dangerous precedent and create an uncontrollable global domino effect. The reason is obvious: the fine in question concerns, in fact, “only” about 12,700 San Marino citizens. But that “theft” of personal data, which took place in 2019, actually affects over 533 million users of social networks worldwide, if we consider that Instagram alone (acquired by Zuckerberg in 2012) at that time had one billion registered users .

Therefore, if the Appeal ruling confirms the validity of the findings of the Guarantor Authority for the Protection of Personal Data, meticulously reconstructed also through the involvement of the Gendarmerie of the Republic of San Marino, there is the risk of arming the other privacy Authorities of the world (England and Ireland seems to be ready to attack) to impose rain penalties on Meta. And those 4 million euros – calculated on the small number of San Marino citizens whose privacy has been violated – if multiplied on the immense mass of subjects involved in this mishap, risk becoming potentially over 166 billion euros in “fines”, according to a banal arithmetic calculation and without the need for an algorithm.

Since 2014, Zuckerberg has also owned WhatsApp and the latter instant messaging system may have been the Trojan horse for the undue integration into Facebook databases, which then ended up in the wrong hands. Perhaps a retaliatory maneuver by a group of angry employees that the US entrepreneur had already imagined firing. Be that as it may, by undertaking this legal action, San Marino has confirmed its desire to exit the condition of “third country” and having the European GDPR as a model it has broken down those constraints that will pave the way for San Marino companies: we are talking about an ultra-modern technological hub attractive to EU and non-EU companies, so that they can operate in the global market. The United States are also “adapting” the Privacy Shield, the self-certification mechanism between the EU and the US for US companies intending to receive sensitive data from Europe.

Will this novel Joan of Arc succeed in which not even Donald Trump, at the height of his power as US president, has managed to bring down the genius of the web into his own network? Who, at the bad end, will always be able to take refuge in his metaverse.