The Wall Street Journal | GPE – December 20, 2017:
Many U.S. companies may think they don’t have to worry about them. But, as Justin Antonipillai and Ajay Arora explain, they do.
‘There are thousands of companies that have no idea that you’re actually covered by this law.’
The Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Stone spoke with two experts to get a handle on the issues: Justin Antonipillai, founder and chief executive of WireWheel and previously acting undersecretary at the Department of Commerce; and Ajay Arora, CEO and co-founder of data-security firm Vera.
MR. STONE: One of the things I was hoping you could help us understand is how and why these rules came about.
MR. ANTONIPILLAI: I came into the Obama administration into the agency that was the lead for privacy rights after the Snowden disclosures. What we saw is that privacy isn’t one of these things that you’re going to see at the lower end of the priority chain.
It has become a trade issue. It has become an issue that comes up as a market issue. And for folks that are on the security side, it is going to be a critical part of your portfolio for the next couple of years.
MR. ARORA: This is an extension of what the EU already has had in place since about 1994. They’ve been talking about taking it to the next level and making it more modern for many years. Even the mind-set of U.S. corporations versus EU corporations is very different. In the EU, they have chief privacy officers. In the U.S., we have chief security officers.
The tendency to look at cybersecurity here is from a “How am I protecting my corporate data from the outside world?” approach. In the EU, it is more about privacy of the individual. They’re at conflict.
U.S. companies are going to have to understand that it isn’t just a change in technology or even process…
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