Slashdot Mirror
Does A Company Deserve the Same Privacy Rights As You?
An anonymous reader writes "The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an important case to determine whether or not AT&T deserves 'personal privacy' rights. The company claimed that the FCC should not be allowed to distribute (under a Freedom of Information Act request) data it had collected concerning possible fraud and overbilling related to the e-rate program. The FCC argued that the information should be made public and that companies had no individual right to 'personal privacy,' the way individuals do. As it stands right now, the appeals court found that companies like AT&T do deserve personal privacy rights, and now the Supreme Court will take up that question as well. Given the results of earlier 'corporation rights' cases, such as Citizens United, at some point you wonder if the Supreme Court will also give companies the right to vote directly."
If this comes to pass, then corporations will soon have more rights than people do. I'd expect to see a whole lot of real estate transactions in Delaware, and a lot more corporations being set up as people incorporate themselves to enjoy everything the government has been doing for corporations lately.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
When it can die like I can. When it can be taken off the streets indefinitely for doing harm to other people, the way I can.
Same goes for free speech in my opinion.
Corporations aren't people.
As a public company, this is clearly material information that needs to be disclosed to all shareholders (current and potential). Once you start trading stock, your corporate right to privacy pretty much disappears, at least where possible criminal activity is concerned.
Companies already vote with their money.
The Citizens United case has no bearing on this one. Anyone who disagrees with the Citizens United decision is dreadfully confused about what free speech means. If a few friends can't start an organization with the goal of promoting their political views without the government telling them what they may and may not say, then we may as well just pack it in right now.
Representation in our government is supposed to be reserved for citizens. Corporations are not citizens, as they are not PEOPLE! I would never go so far as to think that corporations should not hold a certain amount of protection under the law, but this is getting ridiculous.
/RANT
Corporations generally employ groups of people. The rights of this group should be decided based on the rights of the citizens involved. By giving corporations legal rights as individuals the US government is creating a subclass of citizens which have more rights than other citizens based on ownership & employment. This is completely backwards in that publicly traded companies are supposed to be publicly owned, and therefore "Personal Privacy" of corporations becomes nothing more than a farce for withholding information important to a public purchase.
All lobbying should be done by virtue of the rights of an individual citizen, not some money machine. Remove this piece of corruption and require all companies lobbying before Congress to include a list of citizens they represent. This means employees & shareholders of these companies would have to agree to be on that list, for EACH LOBBIED SUBJECT. Very quickly we will all see the truth of who's interests are being represented.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
A decent-sized corporation at the least is equivalent to a public figure. So right there, they'd have a lower expectation of privacy than I would have as a private, nearly anonymous person. Second, I think it's already established that a regulated business which deals with the public has a lower expectation of privacy than a private person.
Consider this. Suppose I personally were doing the business that AT&T was doing. Namely, my superdooper transhumanist implants or whatever allowed me to do the business of a few hundred thousand member corporation. Do I have an expectation of privacy that allows me to deep six an FCC report directly pertaining to my activities that I might find unfavorable to me? To be blunt, I don't think so. In other words, even if we grant a corporation the same privacy rights as a person, I don't see that a person would have an expectation of privacy in this circumstance.
Do corporations accept personal responsibility?
No...?
So how can they possibly demand personal privacy?
Sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander.
No sig today...
Judges can order that a corporation be dissolved for misconduct.
He said "die like I can." When a corporation is dissolved, couldn't that just involve all the executives and assets parting ways, possibly temporarily? Maybe in most cases where that actually happens, the CEOs are convicted on charges and go to jail, and fines are imposed too, but -actually dying-?
If we made it a law that if a corporation is convicted of significant fraud or other misconduct, all of the executives would be executed, the assets confiscated rather than any given back to the shareholders, maybe that would be analogous to dying, and we could begin to talk about corporations having the same consequences you or I face.
Alternatively if medical technology gets to a point where your cells could separate and then be rejoined to reconstitute you at a later time, and that became a good way of getting out of jail sentences, then we could also consider corporations and people to be equivalent.
The concept of rights isn't about what a person can and can't do, it's about limiting the power of government. Freedom of speech is a right. It's implementation in the first amendment is important. The first five words of the first amendment are "Congress shall pass no law". This is an important distinction from "People have the right to" or "People can say whatever they want". "none shall pass", it doesn't matter if it's a flesh wound or a mortal wound, Congress can't make restrictions. Whether people have rights that companies do not is moot. It's whether the government can or can't restrict certain activities.
Some refer to the equal protection clause under these types of situations, but the notion of equality is only relevant if the two entities being compared are effectively equivalent. The notion that companies are equivalent to people is absurd. If companies are equivalent to people, how do you count votes for a company, and in what districts?
A "Company" already is awarded benefits that are grotesquely wrong. One of my main complaints is that the law views a "Corporation" as a single entity, and in this course physical individuals are legally shielded from direct complaints. Only in the most extreme scenerio, oft brought to light by other equally powerful entities, can an individual or board room member be personally charged with a crime.
So I think Companies, Corporations are granted free reign on any tyrannical act they deem profitable. This is already far too much in my opinion.
Now, on to the issue brought up, under my premise that they already get away with murder, my main disagreement with the idea that they should be awarded personal Rights stems from another argument the have to circumvent immediate democratic measures; in other words, they argue that since they employ people that they inherently represent their views regardless under the assumption what's good for the company in turn is good for it's employees and thus surrounding society. This rationale is so flawed, one could write a book on how it's incorrect even without touching on giving jobs to foreigners or off-shore employees.
The above argument basically boils down to public representation. If you are representing the interests of the public, then you should abide by rules, regulations and scrutiny of the public. Period, no other way around it, no argument suffices to contradict this demand. Companies can't have both to choose from whenever the situation best suits them. When they indirectly cause a famine in Africa.... they are a single entity and those involved aren't directly charged and convicted. When the government comes for them, then they want to hide behind Personal Rights as granted to individuals... all the while, they also have to abide by business laws, and international legislation....
No, AT&T does not deserve explicit rights granted to Individual Citizens. They do not deserve the rights they already have.
Since when are rights deserved? ... Rights exist or don't exist.
You're misreading the phrase, badly. It doesn't ask if rights deserve to exist, but if corporations have rights and thus deserve to have them protected by law.
When someone writes, "does a tree deserve the rights to life liberty and happiness", they aren't asking if rights are deserved, but if the tree has rights deserving of protection.
Really simple. Publicly traded companies need to be Publicly Accountable. So, "NO".
The Constitution of the United States of America talks about how the government is to be organized. It also spells out some of the rights of it's citizens (mostly in the Amendments, particularly the Bill of Rights). It's been a while since I've read the whole thing, but I don't recall a single reference to corporations.
Corporations aren't people. They should have very limited rights. Certainly no right to privacy. Certainly no right to free speech.
But money can apparently buy just about anything in the USA. It's already bought corporations more free speech than actual citizens. No doubt it will soon buy corporations more privacy than citizens too. Ain't fascism wonderful?
Rights are not privileges. Privileges might be deserved or not. Rights are not "deserved": they are an inalienable feature of a person. Whatever the "creator" is, the creator of actual people that endowed people with inalienable rights is not a person (nor a government), and does not create corporations. People and governments create corporations, which do not have inalienable anything. Corporations are put together and made, and they can be separated from anything that makes them. They have no rights, only privileges actually assigned to the people who are the executives of the corporation.
The entire notion that a corporation is a person is a legal fraud originally perpetrated as a scam by a railroad monopoly. It's only though relentless corporate interference with the law in the US that corporations are treated as "persons" in any way. This fundamental injustice is the deepest flaw in our current democratic republic, and the source of the majority of our hardest to solve problems.
As for privacy, the US government already fails to protect the privacy of actual people according to the enumeration in the Fourth Amendment: "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects". Somehow Supreme Court justices can read that specification and not recognize the right to privacy it not only recognizes, but actually enumerates. To protect the privacy of corporations as a matter of "right" would pervert the fundamental basis of the US government beyond any ability to take it seriously except as a public office of private corporate power.
--
make install -not war
AT&T wants personal privacy rights? The guys who oh-so-helpfully set up special rooms for the NSA to intercept data traffic, thus violating the personal privacy rights of everyone using their network? That AT&T? Pay attention, Ms. Morissette, for THAT is ironic.
The employees *inside* the corporation have the right to vote, speak, hire lobbyists, et cetera but the corporation itself has no more rights than a building.
The participants in a corporation are shielded for the most part from personal liability. That's the secret sauce that makes corporations so desirable; the people who form a company can pool their money and the entity is held responsible for the activities they collectively engage in, rather than the individuals involved. This is a great incentive for generating entrepreneurial activity, but it also means that the corporation has a legal life of its own, separate from even the founding individuals, much less people who were brought aboard long after the founders died.
The people inside the corporation spend money on lobbyists, PR campaigns, PACs, and so on, but they are merely the servants of the corporation. When Altria spends millions on local, state, and federal elections every year, it's not because J. Worthington Snipe, the guy who runs their Dirty Tricks Division, is exercising his rights as an individual. It's because Altria is taking advantage of its legal right to free speech, as defined by a series of Supreme Court decisions that completely ignore the fact that voting rights only matter if they are not completely overpowered by the 1st Amendment rights of goliath corporations.
The fact that corporations are legal fictions in no way diminishes the fact that they have been given many rights we would otherwise associate only with human beings.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
There is no notion of collective rights in the constitution, only individual rights. Corporations (and LLCs) are state sponsored entities where businesses give up some of their rights in exchange for limited liability. By granting them the same rights as people, while still granting them limited liability, they're elevating corporations above individuals.
Now if you're talking about a proprietorship or a partnership, then yes they should have privacy rights as their liability is the same as yours or mine.
If AT&T doesn't want to play by the rules, then they should have their corporate charter revoked. Otherwise just shut up and enjoy your dance with the devil.
Tomorrow the corporations will have the right to vote. Then they will elect presidents. Then, just as they pay billionaire bonuses to the CEOs, perhaps the rest of you can find something to eat before watch another season of Lost. Governments exist to look out for the interest of PEOPLE. REAL PEOPLE. That's democracy. This thing of even judging constitutionality of applying individual rights to corporations is wrong since the start. It would be right in a Corpocracy. It should be very simple: give corporations the right of 'personal privacy' means do any good for real people? No. Then: no!
I like that one. If you're not a lawyer, you should be one.
I'm a mathematician so I'm not in that dissimilar a field. But to be honest, I think my observation should have been almost obvious. Exploring the consequences of an unusual action should naturally be one of the first things done.
I can't wait for corps to be charged with the 3-strikes laws. Can we get **AA kicked off the internet yet?
There is no way it should have any privacy... Its business practices should be part of public record...
Even if it wasn't publicly traded... That information should be released to the public.. There is no accountability for bad business practices the people that gave it the thumbs up and let it go on.. Should be fired with no bonuses or golden parachutes.. They should be jail since they knowing defrauded people of money.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
A corporation is not a natural person, it is a fictitious entity, and so by definition has no privacy to protect. Each individual can protect their individual privacy. The individuals can band together into an association and protect their freedom of association (to some degree).
A corporation has trade secrets, which it protects as a proxy for the interests of the shareholders. There is already legislation and case law protecting trade secrets. A court should not confuse trade secrets with personal privacy.
Luke, help me take this mask off
How do you imprison a corporation? I go to jail when I steal. When a corporation steals, what happens? Also there will never again be a corporate death penalty. Hell if we won't let corporations "too big to fail" collapse under their own stupidity, then we will never kill a corporation no matter what it does.
Give them jail time:
A company cannot operate for a certain number of years and must close its doors if they break laws.
Give them proportional fines:
If an individual person gets a $500 fine for a minor infraction, a company with 100,000 employees breaks gets a $50,000,000 dollar fine for every minor infraction. If a major infraction carried a $250,000 fine (like piracy does) the company will be on the hook for $25 billion
Give them the death penalty:
A jury can liquidate the company's assets for serious lawbreaking if a fine is un-payable or inadequate for the seriousness of the offense.
Hold their executives personally accountable:
No more hiding behind the corporation! If you gave the order to break the law, or your board agreed on such an order, you get to spend eternity in prison while your company gets liquidated.
Corporations are the "Blade" of humanity. All of our rights, none of our responsibilities!