As eBay’s Meg Whitman becomes co-chair of Sen. John McCain’s national campaign, she talks to our Lesley Stahl about retiring from the business world and about her future. The following is part III of a VII-part, exclusive interview that took place on Tuesday, March 11. To read the entire interview, click the links at the end of the article.

LESLEY: Let me ask you about an issue I think everybody who’s out on the web cares about: privacy. I wonder what your thoughts are, having really been immersed in this for all these years now. What can sites, like eBay and Facebook, all of them, do to improve the protections on privacy for those of us who use the sites? Medical records are out there. Job histories are floating around out there, all in the space. What can be done?

MEG: Well, I think the first thing is that every website must have a visible, easy-to-understand privacy policy that’s written in plain English. And that is a minimum requirement. And so, if you, as a user of eBay or any of these other sites, want to know what the privacy policy is, you can go to a spot on the website and you can read it and understand it. And we, for 10 years, have had a privacy policy that is much stricter than sort of, if you will, industry standards. We are very clear that we don’t share personal data, that we don’t sell lists. And consumers deserve to know what the privacy policy is of every website that they do business with. The second thing that every web company must do, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re big or you’re small, is the security around your systems. There are people all over the web, all over the world, who are trying to hack into every system …

LESLEY: Yeah.

MEG: … whether it’s Bank of America or eBay or the U.S. Treasury or whatever. And you must hire the people and invest in the system’s capability to keep your data safe. You must do very basic things, like encrypt every single credit card or financial instrument that you have. You can’t have encrypted data on the same server as you do basic information about your customers. So there’s this series, I would call it Security 101, that every company must invest in.

LESLEY: But you have to keep improving it because of the hackers.

MEG: Absolutely.

LESLEY: It’s like an arms race.

MEG: It is an arms race. They get better, you get better, they get better, you get better. And, frankly, for a company eBay’s size, with the technology count that we have, I feel quite secure about the systems that we have around the world. But you have to be vigilant and you have to be investing in the new technologies because this is a problem that will be with us for the next 20 years. This is just a matter of doing business in an entirely new medium. And it’s incredibly important.

LESLEY: And you must have – I’m asking, this is a question – a whole budget item set aside just to keep up with the latest in security?

MEG: Absolutely.

LESLEY: These walls get broken, you have to build them again. They get broken. It’s constant.

MEG: And you want people on your staff who can anticipate what the bad people are going to try to do and stop them. It’s a unique talent that every web company must have on their staff. And, frankly, every government must have. You might have read, about two years ago, that the government of Estonia had a security breach. And it was, I guess, some nefarious individuals who shut down the government for a day. And you can only imagine what would happen if that happened in the United States or France or Germany or Italy.

LESLEY: Or eBay – shut down eBay for a day.

MEG: You have to take it very seriously.

Meg Whitman on What’s Next After eBay (Part I)
Meg Whitman: ‘Oh, Gosh. People Put Up Anything You Can Imagine’ (Part II)
Meg Whitman: ‘I Think It’s Better, but We’ve Got a Long Way to Go’ (Part IV)
Meg Whitman: ‘We Took Turns Sabotaging Each Others’ Careers’ (Part V)
Meg Whitman: ‘Glam, She’s Not?’ (Part VI)
Meg Whitman on Running a Household and Thoughts on the Economy (Part VII)