Nov 18, 2025

Yet regulation has a funny way of sticking around, particularly when it's about something that people care about and are ready to spend their hard-earned dollars on. Over the past years, that crew has found a louder voice as right-wing politics have surged across the globe. Even the European Union, famous for defining everything from fish size to banana curvature, has started questioning the limits of its own bureaucracy. The proposed internal combustion ban is already being tested, and the mood has shifted from blind faith in oversight to cautious pragmatism. Still, two areas have refused to fade. Environmental rules may have begun to sputter, but privacy has not. It began in Brussels with the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that once looked like bureaucratic theater and now stands as one of the most consequential global exports of the century. California, New York City, São Paulo, and Singapore soon followed. Today, more than four-fifths of the world's population is covered by some form of privacy regulation, according to the International Association of Privacy Professionals The regulatory waves are real, and while opposition remains, others have learned to ride them. And for those standing on the sidelines, there's much to learn from the ones mastering the crest. One of those riders is Usercentrics, a Munich-born platform that quietly reached €100 million in annual recurring revenue this August. The task it has taken for itself is to help companies manage consented user data, which is about as plumbing-of-the-internet as one can get. And yet, the result is something the web has sorely lacked and clients are clearly ready to pay for, namely trust engineered at scale. From scandal to awareness “Cambridge Analytica was the canary in the coal mine,” said Brittany Kaiser , the whistleblower who helped expose how political campaigns harvested millions of Facebook profiles without consent “People thought data privacy was a fringe issue. Overnight, it became the story of our time,” she continued. Kaiser's revelations and those shared by others who joined the mission in 2018 triggered public outrage, and soon they would rewire global regulation and corporate behavior. “What shocked people wasn't the data collection itself, it was the realization of how invisible it all was,” she said. “Cambridge Analytica wasn't the first, and it definitely won't be the last. The issue was and remains structural.” Since then, the structure has started to subtly change. Governments moved fast, and Kaiser herself helped shape several of the first legislative frameworks for digital assets and data ownership in the U.S. “I worked on laws that made encryption, blockchain, and consent mechanisms explicitly legal,” she said. “If we didn't write those rights down, the conversation would've stayed too abstract for people to care.” Consumers, meanwhile, adapted to both ends of the spectrum In China, the trade-off between data privacy and state stability has been normalized to the point where social credit scores are no longer an issue. Elsewhere, users have grown used to giving up data for convenience and free services. When you do a search on Google, remember that you're paying with your data and purchase habits. Kaiser rejects the underlying logic of necessary trade-offs the modern platform economies have come to present. “It's a false dichotomy,” she said. “We don't have to trade our privacy to have technology that works. Companies can protect people and still make money. In fact, that's the only sustainable path forward.” And some are making bank by doing exactly that. Doing w ell by doing right by the customer's customer For Donna Dror, the CEO of Usercentrics , that path is the business. “We're focused on fixing what shouldn't be broken,” she told me. “Regulations might have pushed awareness, but the real driver is trust. Clients don't come to us because they fear penalties. They come because their customers demand confidence.” That confidence is fast becoming currency. According to Cisco's latest benchmark study , 95 percent of customers say they will not buy from organizations that don't protect their data. For companies like Usercentrics, the wave is much less about compliance and much more about the inherent opportunity therein. At the same time, the regulatory-tech industry, once the unglamorous plumbing of digital infrastructure, is becoming indispensable because of the growing sophistication of end-users, not all of whom have given up on their data. In fact, many players don't even see themselves as compliance businesses anymore. “We help companies grow through trust,” Dror said. “Privacy is a design principle, not an afterthought.” Oscar Rodriguez, Vice President of Product at LinkedIn , sees the same pattern. “Trust and authenticity is going to matter more than anything else online,” he said. LinkedIn's answer to the growing trust gap has been to invest in verifications. Verification badges on the platform allow members to build trust by showing that specific information about their account such as their identity or workplace has been confirmed. Rodriguez explained that verified profiles get 60 percent more views and 30 percent more connection requests, showing that the users themselves gravitate towards features that embed trust natively into the platforms. There are now over 90 million verified members and counting, with 75 people verifying every minute. “No system is perfect,” Rodriguez said. “But continuous verification, proof that you are who you say you are, builds confidence that scales.” Now, LinkedIn is working to bring those verifications to partner platforms off of LinkedIn, to help boost trust and authenticity further across the internet. "The future of the internet will hinge on verifiable trust,” Rodriguez continued. “That's what keeps people, companies, and markets functioning.” Dror agrees. “When you think about it, trust is the new network effect,” she said. “The more transparent and consent-driven your ecosystem is, the more valuable it becomes.” With the end users ready to demand it, all businesses now needs to do is start delivering. Building companies with intention Behind every regulatory wave are investors who spot conviction before the crowd does. Elodie Dupuy, managing partner at Insight Partners , saw Usercentrics early. “Our sourcing tech picked it up in 2020,” she recalled in our interview. “Regulation was driving adoption, and that's one of the best forms of downside protection you can have.” Dupuy's thesis was that compliance budgets don't move much once committed. When paired with real demand, the result is resilience. “Every website you visit says Usercentrics at the bottom,” she said. “That's not a marketing choice. It's an infrastructure decision.” Soon after investing, Dupuy's team facilitated a merger with Denmark's , creating what she called “a perfect match” of technology and trust. “The gap in the market was obvious,” she said. “But most people don't act because they think regulatory tech is boring. The truth is, that's where the impact is.” Dror echoes the point. “This space rewards patience,” she said. “You can ignore the hype cycles, because what this is really about is building trust into the digital supply chain, one consent at a time.” That deliberate approach has delivered, with Usercentrics processing more than seven billion consents each month across 2.3 million websites and apps, leading to its €100m ARR earlier this October. For Kaiser, the fact that companies that put user consent and trust first are reaching such highs underscores broader truth. “Private-sector innovation is part of the solution,” she said. “The same way green tech helped translate climate regulation into business models, privacy tech is doing that for data rights.” Her own venture, AlphaTON Capital, is investing in tools that embed privacy and data ownership into blockchain-based ecosystems. “The goal isn't to run from regulation,” she said. “It's to build products that make compliance obsolete because they do the right thing by design.” That may sound idealistic, but the market is clearly catching up. Investor capital is flowing into consent-management, identity verification, and digital-trust infrastructure. Governments are codifying ownership rights for data and digital assets. And companies like Usercentrics, LinkedIn and AlphaTon are proving that scaling trust is not only possible but profitable. “We used to think of privacy as the brake pedal,” Dror said. “Now it's the accelerator. When customers know you respect their data, they stay, they share, and they spend.” Rodriguez puts it more simply. “Trust is the growth engine of the modern internet,” he said. The companies that treat regulation as gravity to navigate with, not to fight against, end up building sturdier businesses. The rest spend their time trying to rewrite the laws of nature, only to end up on the losing side of the battle. User consent may not be flashy, but its rise shows that even in an era obsessed with speed, trust remains the most scalable asset of all.