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Corporations Now Have a Right To "Personal Privacy"
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Thanks to a recent ruling (PDF) by the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, corporations now have a right to 'personal privacy,' due to the application of a carelessly worded definition in the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA exempts disclosure of certain records, but only if it 'could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.' But in its definitions, FOIA makes the mistake of broadly defining 'person' to include legal entities, like corporations. The FCC didn't think that 'personal privacy' could apply to a corporation, so they ignored AT&T's claim that releasing data from an investigation into how AT&T was overcharging certain customers would violate the corporation's privacy. The Third Circuit thought that the FCC's actions were contrary to what the law actually says. So now the FCC has to jump through more hoops to show that releasing data on their investigation into AT&T's overcharging is 'warranted' within the meaning of 5 USC 552(b)(7)(c) before it can release anything."
Seriously. Can anyone with a legal background explain what part of corporate daily business requires that corporations be legally considered equivalent to people?
If there's nothing truly fundamental that requires it, I think it might be time to start writing letters to our representatives and senators asking that corporate personhood be revoked, or at least replaced with something much more watered-down. It's really starting to go too far...
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Nice work. Just so you know, when the revolution comes you'll be first against the wall.
"lobbiests"?
Is that a word describing people who are the most lobbie?
And is a Hooray some sort of energy weapon made out of the sound an owl makes? :)
At the rate this idiocy is going it won't be long until directors of failed corporations get charged with manslaughter or murder....
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Can we do this for the Commerce Clause?
The obvious answer is that corporations as part of their activities would say that everything on their computers belongs to the people using them, and their employment is a purchase of some assets or IP back. Everything else, your emails, your non-contracted work product, etc, would be your personal property, and then corps would literally own nothing to produce in court, except a finished product and some bills.
This is my sig.
So corporations get all the right of an individual, but with nothing but monetary penalties when they do something criminal like poison the ground water. The jerks responsible just close up shop and start a new corporation and rinse repeat.
Why should a Publicly Traded Company have any expectation of privacy?
And saying that Corporations in general are entitled to the same privacy protections as individuals seems really silly to me.
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I, for one, believe it is time for lesser minds to have some influence on the laws which are inflicted upon them.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Well, those lesser minds have voted in one of their own.
We'll see how well it goes.
So does this mean that if a corporation goes bankrupt the CEO can be brought up on murder charges?
This can easily be resolved by acknowledging that there is no right to privacy.
Corporations are not people! They are not endowed by their creators with certain unalienable rights! They have no freedom of speech! The have to right to privacy! God damn corporatists, literally!
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Sorry, Ralph Nader didn't win. Nice try, Analogy Guy.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I get so tired of hearing about who corporation XXX screwed today. Give them some privacy with their sex lives. I don't even want to imagine what Microsoft and Apple do when alone together.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Corporations need to be treated like people because there is almost no other way to hold up the ideals of a free market. The constitution was designed to protect the freedoms of individuals, but before corporations were treated as people, they could be undermined simply by using the protections of the constitution against them. By treating corporations as people, we eliminate that loophole to ensure that corporations are able to sell their products with as little regulation and oversight as possible. This is how it should be, folks.
The government should not have the right to publish private information that they have seized just because it does not pertain to a natural person. What if they seize your customer records in the course of an investigation of one of your customers? Should your competitors be able to see those records just because you took the sensible precaution of incorporating your business?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Corporations might have a right to corporate privacy but not to personal privacy.
If they are people give them a right to vote. I mean by pencil, not by money ;-)
And jail them if they do something wrong and make them stop operating until they get out. Would they accept?
That's rhetoric and ideology, not legal reasoning.
Why can there not be legal language giving corporations a specific set of rights necessary to act as corporations must and should, yet not defining them as people?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Go to http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2469/how-can-a-corporation-be-legally-considered-a-person and do a find on "court reporter"
I consider myself reasonably smart, and I wouldn't mind serving on a jury.
Only problem is, from everything I've seen and heard, my intelligence, basic working knowledge of the legal system, inquisitive mind, and sense of justice would result in me getting removed in the first round of jury selection.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
After reading through the decision and the relevant law, I feel confident in stating that the 3rd Circuit did not just "invent" a right to personal privacy for corporations: it appears that right is codified in law, at least as regards the Freedom of Information Act. This is not a big deal, since all that means is that Federal agencies can't publish private data about corporations, which they don't really need to do perform their regulatory functions.
The real question is, what is private about a publicly traded company? Sensitive personal information is normally limited to things like birthdates, Social Security numbers/Tax ID numbers, mother's maiden name, and other identifying bits of information. In this case, it would be proper for the TIN of a corporation to be kept private, since someone could use that to take out credit in the name of the corporation, just like ID theft of individuals. Any other information that can be used in that way should also be protected. Whether the data that AT&T was trying to protect counts as protected remains to be seen, the FCC will still have to rule on that.
Disclosure: I work for AT&T, though not in any department or division relevant to this case.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Section F of the linked statute seems to already make exemptions (subsection b) for certain information, including:
Given that the meaning of "personal privacy" here can in no way be construed as pertaining to a corporate person, which has no construable medical information or personnel data pertaining to it, or similar files, how can the court possibly interpret the phrase to include them in another section? The law must be read as to have consistent meaning of terminology for it to be coherent and enforceable. The court has made a grievous error in judgment, and this should be quashed on appeal.
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People vote for smarter representatives all the time... they are called Europeans.
In the US, our system is so corrupt from top to bottom. There's too much corporate money involved in elections and campaigns, and their are too many stupid Americans who vote based on things like abortion, banning gay marriage, being able to have prayer in schools, keeping guns unrestricted, and eliminating the IRS. They've been brainwashed to think that God will just make everything okay if they make sure all the "dirty sinful liberals" can't actually pass laws like economic and health reform. There is no logical discourse in our country any more as it's drowned out by illogical screaming, and that screaming is backed by corporate money because corporations don't like democracy. How can we vote smarter politicians into office when the ten idiots around you are voting for the idiot?
Yes I know European politicians aren't perfect but our idiots make their idiots pale in comparison in sheer ineptitude and corruption.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
As long as my robot has the same right!
This deals a significant blow to consumer rights and makes it very difficult to regulate and watch dog corporations. I guess we have GOP judge. This ruling should again be appealed to be heard by a higher authority.
Yes, but it's worse than that - corporations are extensions of government. Only the government grant of existence, immunity, and immortality enables a corporation. Without government, we just have partnerships.
So, you have tentacles of government controlling government, especially regarding how those tentacles are operated, but with massive bleed-over into anything that could negatively impact those tentacles (at the citizens' expense). This is a classic positive feedback loop. Our system of government was designed with checks and balances - explicit negative feedback loops to prevent this kind of anti-human power center from forming (one could argue the design has some bugs).
The trick is, un-doing Santa Clara is big thread to tug on, and *lots* of things unravel when you do so. I'd argue it's necessary, but the government, errr, I mean corporations (or do I?) will fight it tooth and nail.
Yet the power derives from the consent of the people - we just need to step up and exert the power we have. Hey, what's on TV tonight?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What incredible hypocrisy! An employee working for a corporation has NO expectation of privacy - they can be fired for sending emails to coworkers, using facebook on a company computer, or many other activities, but that same corporation can then turn around and claim privacy when the Federal government wants to investigate their actions? That is complete BS. We, as a people, need to rise up and demand our basic right to live as more than mindless corporate drones! Big brother *is* watching, and his title is CEO...
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Seems to be Corporations have more rights than people now, not to mention an army of lawyers to defend them. It's sort of depressing.
As is so often the case, the headline is misleading. This is not an issue with the rights and legal definitions of a corporation, but the specific structure and definitions of the Freedom of Information Act. I don't see how it could impact the general issue of the rights of a corporation, because the FOIA has nothing to do with creating or altering those rights; it merely happened to define the exemption in such a way that a corporation qualified. This is an FOIA issue, not a broader corporate law issue.
And I strongly suspect any attempt to use this as a precedent for unrelated 'rights of corporations' issues would get shot down; it's a very specific case dealing with a specific provision of a specific law.
Burn it to the ground.
PS: Good job with the login system, idiots.
To get there, you need an act of Congress, whose members are highly susceptible to lobbying by corporations. This has to be addressed by the Supreme Court, the same body who screwed this up a century ago. Thanks to Obama's recent appointment to the Court, this question is actually being raised, and there's at least one other Justice inclined to agree with her. Of course, they're still in the minority but it's unclear how the rest of them think, and even a strong minority opinion on this issue could be helpful in eventual change on this very important question.
With this, hopefully more corporate fiendly senators and congressmen will feel the need to strengthen the privacy of normal US citizens. Maybe it is time for a Privacy Amendment to the constitution.
Free speech for corporations? Either that is not true, or is just for profit corporations.
The government (in the USA anyway) has a long story of trying to shut down non for profit corporations that dare to say that a certain candidate is no good.
Most U.S. corporations are not multi-million dollar Fortune 500 corporations - it is apparent to me, based on many of the comments here, that many of you have this ignorant perception that they are. Well, it doesn't help that the defendant in this case is the big bad death star - AT&T.
The fact is, about 98% of the corporations in the United States are closely held corporations - this simply means there's no public market readily available to sell those shares, and in all likelihood, the shares are closely held by a few people, sometimes just one person. In most instances, they're small, family owned businesses, though there are some very successful closely held corporations (e.g. Mars, Inc. - the candy maker).
Your entire premise is incorrect. In the USA, at least, the sole purpose of a corporation is to provide limited *financial* liability to its *shareholders*; limiting their financial liability to the amount that they invested in the corporation's stock. The officers and directors of a corporation certainly can be, and have been, held both criminally and civilly liable for their own wrongdoing, and for corporate wrongdoing that they either directed in advance, or ratified after the fact. Nowhere in the US concept of corporations does the idea of "...to AVOID personal responsibility" appear.
Seriously... I could see only advantages being incorporated over being a simple human being.
The board of directors, of course, are shareholders, and normally some of the very biggest ones. It's not rare for the board to collectively hold a controlling share of a corporation, even without recourse to tricks like share classes with limited voting rights. So saying that corporations don't care about shareholders isn't the most insightful way of putting it; it's more like majority shareholders have interests that are different from minority shareholders.
One example: if you're a majority shareholder, you almost automatically welcome the company's an acquisition of another business (as long as it's at the right price), because it diversifies the income streams to your corporation and thus reduces the risk of the stock that makes up the vast majority of your wealth. A minority shareholder, on the other hand, can simply buy another stock to add to his portfolio, so an acquisition only makes sense if the combined business is more efficient than the pieces held separately.
Are you adequate?
FOIA makes the mistake of broadly defining 'person' to include legal entities, like corporations.
Who the heck ever said this was done by mistake? Equally likely was some lobbyist convincing the author that the change was innocuous enough.
I am officially gone from
Does no one else find it ironic that effectively the _only_ entities with a right to privacy are the corporations which help the government spy on the rest of us?
If a legal person, corporation or not, is suspected of breaking the law, they can and should be served with a subpoena/warrant just like us flesh and blood schmucks.
A Constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are legally not individuals is long overdue.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
My "rhetoric and ideology" is based on decades of rational thought and experience. I know you statists hate to admit it, but the free market is PROVEN to be the only rational way of running a society. So please stop trying to change the subject and start educating yourself.
My "rhetoric and ideology" is based on decades of rational thought and experience. I know you statists hate to admit it, but the free market is PROVEN to be the only rational way of running a society. So please stop trying to change the subject and start educating yourself.
Pot, meet kettle.
I asked a simple question, the answer to which would have been some concrete facts about specific rights, duties, etc. You responded with standard libertarian ideology.
I didn't say that you were wrong. Whether or not your ideology is correct is irrelevant to this. I just said that you didn't answer the question, which you didn't.
And then you accuse me of trying to change the subject and link to Ayn Rand in the same breath?
You're either a towering hypocrite or a troll.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Legal entities are not persons. Corporations are not persons. The law that says so is moronic and stupid. If corporations are persons, then they are sociopathic, and should be locked up away from mainstream society. Seriously. The law should be finally struck and not revisited.
A corporate body is a body of individuals. Those individuals have the rights of individuals, including expectations of privacy. An individual's expectation of privacy extends to his or her business affairs. Why should collaboration with other individuals cause you to lose those rights? If corporations don't have an expectation of privacy, what about partnerships? What about households? I don't see how this right can be consistently denied to corporations.
I think my computer should be given people status as well. After all, it gobbles energy all day long, it can see me with its eye, it can hear me when I speak, it is warm on the inside, and it makes disagreeable noises when I press its buttons. Oh, and spews out crap constantly!...Thats a people if you ask me.
As far an I know, German courts know a rule, that what is most important, is not the exact wording of something, but the intention behind it. So in this case, it would be obvious, that the personal privacy thing was meant for real people only, and the whole thing would be over.
Is there no such concept in US courts? Or has someone used another loophole to get around that? Can a court still stop that "corporations as real persons" thing?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Honestly I'm not sure who I want to win.
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?