During mergers and acquisitions, CIPM highlights the importance of privacy due diligence focused on regulatory compliance, data protection risks, and operational gaps. Assessing the target company's compliance posture and identifying privacy or security shortcomings are essential to understanding inherited risk. Ensuring data migration does not cause data loss is also directly tied to confidentiality, integrity, and availability obligations.
Openness and transparency to future customers, while important from a reputational or marketing standpoint, is not a primary privacy risk evaluation factor during acquisition due diligence. CIPM frames acquisition assessments around legal exposure, remediation costs, and alignment with the acquiring organization's privacy framework. Transparency initiatives typically occur post-acquisition and are part of external communications and notice updates rather than core risk evaluation activities.