Does A Company Deserve the Same Privacy Rights As You? 379
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."
Really (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really (Score:5, Insightful)
then corporations will soon have more rights than people do
They already do. They get all the rights we do but with very few of
the consequences.
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Personal rights are for people (Score:1, Insightful)
Corporations aren't people.
Public Company (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Voting (Score:2, Insightful)
Companies already vote with their money.
Citizens United (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Citizens United (Score:1, Insightful)
And hey, if those "few friends" should *happen* to have tens of millions of dollars and *happen* to want legislation passed to benefit them, why shouldn't they be able to buy some votes, amirite?
Re:Citizens United (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is different from any individual buying any of this how? I'm pretty sure Bill Gates (or, if you prefer, Steve Forbes) can buy elections on his own just as well as most corporations can.
Rights do not disappear because you associate with someone, or because you have more money than them. Rush Limbaugh has just as much right to free speech as I do, despite the fact that he influences a great many more people.
Keep in mind that the New York Times is a corporation. So is every other news organization. Why should only "news" organizations be allowed political free speech?
A corporation is nothing more than a specific legal organization of individuals. Corporations do not have rights, but the individuals organized in them do not lose their rights just because they organized.
Re:Citizens United (Score:5, Insightful)
The way I see it, if we sit back and allow multi-billion dollar corporations control our elections, we might as well pack it in.
Go ahead, trumpet your free speech rights all you want -- as an insignificant slave to our corporate masters, what good does your free speech do? Do you think anyone will listen to you when the media is dominated by organizations outspending you by a factor of a thousand to one?
We need to remove the need for astounding amounts of money from the political process. This is the only way we can restore some form of democracy.
Corporations are not citizens (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
One thing that crops up (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Short answer: no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do corporations accept personal responsibility?
No...?
So how can they possibly demand personal privacy?
Sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander.
Re:Citizens United (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll tell you what undermines the country: simply deciding that you don't like something, and so the rule of law can go to hell.
Re:Given your criteria corps should have the right (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Citizens United (Score:4, Insightful)
I suppose you'd say I were just as free if the government specified that I was only allowed to criticize the government in falsetto, wearing a tutu, and addressing a potted plant.
both are wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Since when are rights deserved? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Really (Score:2, Insightful)
Didn't ya hear?
Come this November Microsoft will be casting approximately ~1 million ballots (one per employee they represent). Ditto Apple. The corporate "person" has won the right to vote. (just joking). 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.
This truth is self-evident.
Re:Citizens United (Score:5, Insightful)
Freedom of the press is outlined separately in the first amendment from freedom of speech. Maybe there was a reason for that. Wouldn't freedom of speech alone be sufficient if all corporations (news papers included) had the same freedom of speech as other citizens?
Re:Really (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not just let corporations take over the government...
Hi, welcome to 21st century America, I see you are new here...
Simple Answer (Score:1, Insightful)
Really simple. Publicly traded companies need to be Publicly Accountable. So, "NO".
No (Score:2, Insightful)
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 "Deserved" (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [cornell.edu]: "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.
Wait, AT&T? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Corporations *do* have rights (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
There are no collective rights! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This is the kind of thing that will destroy USA (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Citizens United (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Clever argument (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
3 Strikes laws (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't wait for corps to be charged with the 3-strikes laws. Can we get **AA kicked off the internet yet?
Its a Publicly Traded Company (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Really (Score:1, Insightful)
Churches are a huge political and financial force and they should be taxed as businesses are or, better, abolished outright.
Re:Really (Score:5, Insightful)
They already do. They get all the rights we do but with very few of the consequences.
Absolutely. Corps will start to deserve the same rights as people the day something like a manslaughter verdict is enough to fiscally isolate an entire corp from society in the same way jail would isolate a flesh and blood human.
A Person has privacy, a Corporation trade secrets (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Citizens United (Score:3, Insightful)
If that's the case, that people will mindlessly vote for the candidate with the most advertising, then the fix is not making a bunch of ridiculous, unconstitutional rules about who can say what. I'm not sure what the answer is, but it would be pretty drastic. Fortunately, I really don't believe that to be the case.
Lobbying can give money to politicians' campaigns, but again, that does not necessarily translate to votes.
Re:both are wrong. (Score:3, Insightful)
You're also conflating people and corporations.
Let me just make it clear: any analogy that attempts to explain corporate personhood by starting with "You do/want" is so fundamentally flawed that I'm not sure we're living on the same planet. A corporation is an artificial construct whose only purpose is to optimize productivity. Just to be clear, this means that your driver's license analogy explains and illustrates absolutely nothing about corporate personhood.
To dissect your argument further: disallowing a corporation to spend money on elections is not the same as the government removing the owner of a privately held company for objectionable political views. It's not happening here either. That's Venezuela you're looking for there. No one is also punishing a corporation if its members exercise their free speech as individual citizens. Hasn't happened, and it didn't need the Citizen United case to keep it from happening.
Re:Given your criteria corps should have the right (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Corporations *do* have rights (Score:5, Insightful)
...how do you mete out punishments?
Corporate death penalty. Revoke the charter. Seize all assets. Render all shares worthless. It would be very effective. The so-called "innocent" share holders? Tough shit... Next time keep an eye on the people you invest with.
Corporate officers who make decisions can be charged personally for any criminal violations that may occur.
So yes. it can be made as simple as desired.
Re:Really (Score:3, Insightful)
Freedom of religion does not grant special tax status. In fact doing so is a violation, as the government is granting exemptions only to certain religions it recognizes as such.
Re:Corporations *do* have rights (Score:5, Insightful)
If they can be punished like individuals, sure! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:No, especially publicly traded companies, but.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:There are no collective rights! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Really (Score:2, Insightful)
enough to fiscally isolate an entire corp from society in the same way jail would isolate a flesh and blood human.
fiscally isolate an entire corp from society? Sounds like an anti-trust violation, or... what do corps call it tortious interference [wikipedia.org]?
The idea that corporations have a right to their business and anyone 'isolating' them or 'getting in the way' does something illegal
You can think of it as the corporate version of the right to the 'pursuit of happiness'
Re:Corporations *do* have rights (Score:3, Insightful)
Corporate death penalty. Revoke the charter. Seize all assets. Render all shares worthless. It would be very effective.
Well, that is already always an option. The problem is often that the company has fought all the way down or is some form of separate legal entity. Take SCO as an example of the first, even if Novell and IBM win a kazillion dollar in damages the assets will never cover it. A lot of other companies, particularly in areas like construction often just exist to put up the building then go bankrupt so people can't claim liability for shoddy work. Or like every restaurant and night club runs, one property company and one operating company. Only the operating company ever goes bankrupt after having paid a nice rent. Hell even big companies like Enron disappear in a puff of smoke that way.
Corporate officers who make decisions can be charged personally for any criminal violations that may occur.
I think you've already tried it with CFOs and the SOX law, and what it created was a massive paranoid overreaction because the CFO felt he could end up in jail for something that wasn't his fault. Would you for example be head of development on a huge software project yet be personally liable and go to jail if any of your developers or subcontractors decided to illegally copy some code into your product? Absolutely decision takers should be put in jail if the crimes are a direct result of decisions they made. But very few would leave a smoking gun like that, and then it becomes a question of who knew, who accepted, who gave the nudge-nudges and wink-winks and who just acted on their own like loose cannons. Otherwise you'll have a lot of innocent scapegoats in jail and achieve little.
Re:Really (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, by definition a corporation is set up to make people less liable for their actions. I mean, what did you think LLC stands for? Sure, if you order your corporate minions to outright murder someone you'll usually go to jail, but if it's along the lines of "whoops, the battery in that car explodes and kills people? Who would have guessed?" all that happens is that the corporation is fined some money. The government doesn't even get to go after anyone's personal bank account.
I personally think that this is a complete travesty. We should, basically, abolish the corporation. If you're going to do business, you will be responsible for making sure your products don't kill people - not some nebulous legal entity.
Re:Really (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Corporations *do* have rights (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish I had mod points today. But you're already at +5 so ... ;)
Corporates server under charter of the state. They exist as a creation of the state. And as such the state should be able to revoke the charter under certain conditions, and the board of directors and Chief officers arrested and held criminally.
The board is there to make sure that the Officers are doing their job, and if everyone is on the same ticket, they should be tossed into the same cell to rot.
I'm for free markets, and liberty to people. Not corporate collectivism and rights to non-person entities.
Re:Corporations *do* have rights (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Really (Score:3, Insightful)
And how would they find that evidence, when all you did was demand the impossible from your employees and get a faulty product out of it?
Hell, if you just went around and said "look guys I know it has some problems but we need to ship now" you'd still be pretty much safe. Bernie Madoff's only failing was that he was so blatant about it.
Re:Really (Score:5, Insightful)
The original idea isn't bad. Corporations are supposed to exist to shield investors in a company from liability created by its officers.
Actually, in the US, the original idea of a corporation was that they had to serve the public good. Every 20 years, the corporate charter was reviewed by the secretary of state. If the corporation was no longer serving the public good, its charter was revoked and the corporation was no more. See Thom Hartmann's Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights [amazon.com] for the whole history.
Re:Really (Score:4, Insightful)
There is an enormous difference between a public company and a private company. A public company is not entitled to any privacy where the information being withheld has a material impact upon their actual or perceived value to current or potential investors.
Any company that attempts to keep secret information, that has a detrimental value upon the company, is attempting to defraud potential investors and, setting them up for losses, so that existing corrupt executives can dump their worthless share options onto yet another sucker pension fund.
That AT&T are signalling their intent to keep secrets facts that could have an impact upon their investment value is a sign to the SEC that AT&T should immediately be investigated to find what else in being kept secret and about to explode in current or potential investors faces after, AT&T executives and insiders have dumped their shares.
If the claim by AT&T is the information should be kept secret because it will affect their value, then logically the judge is forced to release that information equally to all parties at the same time, for exactly that reason.