In the sprawling, humming campus of a leading tech giant in Silicon Valley, where jargon like “synergy” and “disruption” hung in the air as thick as the scent of cold brew coffee, Steffi Sesuraj was known for two things: her encyclopedic knowledge of data privacy law and her uncanny ability to explain it without putting anyone to sleep.

After law school, while her peers flocked to corporate mergers and intellectual property battles, Steffi dove headfirst into the then-niche world of data privacy. She pored over the dense, 88-page text of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) like it was a thriller novel. While others saw compliance checklists, she saw a framework for dignity.

Steffi wasn’t a coder. She couldn’t architect a cloud database or debug a Python script. But she was fluent in the language that made those things matter: trust.

The backlash, when it came, was brief. The public, exhausted by corporate cover-ups, was stunned by the honesty. News headlines read: “Company Messes Up, Then Does the Unthinkable: Tells the Truth.” The stock dipped for a day, then soared as the company was hailed as a new gold standard for digital ethics.