Journal of
Corporate
Renewal
July/Aug
2017
Target. Yahoo! PF Chang’s.
Home Depot. Sony.
These are but a handful of the headline-grabbing privacy and data breach
incidents that have had direct negative
business impacts on the affected
companies. Organizations that ignore
the reality of these incidents, as well as
the growing body of applicable laws,
regulations, and generally accepted
business practices, do so at their peril.
Prudence therefore requires that
organizations of all sizes and types
develop, implement, and maintain
appropriately reasonable systems for
PRIVACY, CYBERSECURITY:
What Private Equity, Restructuring Pros Need to Know
BY ERIK B. WEINICK, CIPP-US, OTTERBOURG P.C.
ensuring the privacy and security
of the information they receive,
create, maintain, and/or transfer.
Firms involved in private equity
and corporate restructuring are not
immune from these concerns, and
indeed, face certain unique issues.
As noted jurists Samuel Warren and
Louis Brandeis wrote nearly 130 years
ago, privacy is the “right to be left
alone.” [Harv. L. Rev. 4. 1890]. Privacy
can include bodily privacy (the right
to physical privacy), territorial privacy
(the right to privacy in certain spaces,
such as a person’s home), information
privacy (a person’s right to keep
personal information private), and
communications privacy (the right
to privacy in communications).
Corporate privacy and cybersecurity
professionals focus their work on
information and communications
privacy and are specifically concerned
with what is known as “personally
identifiable information” (PII). Although
there is no official definition in the
United States due to a lack of an
overarching uniform federal regulatory
scheme, PII is generally regarded as a
person’s name when combined with Journal of Corporate
continued on page 26
