Not really so surprising, I suppose, but Dahlia Lithwick points out those corporate privacy rights are expanding even as our individual privacy rights are shrinking:
The Supreme Court has now agreed to hear a case in which AT&T prevailed in its efforts to evade a Freedom of Information Act request because Exemption 7(C) of FOIA, protecting “personal privacy,” also now protects the privacy of corporate entities. The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals held that FOIA “unambiguously indicates that a corporation may have a “personal privacy” interest within the meaning of Exemption 7 (C)” and noted in a footnote that “corporations, like human beings, face public embarrassment, harassment, and stigma.”
It used to be the case that embarrassment, harassment, and stigma were the best check against corporate wrongdoing. But that was before corporations had feelings. Of course the 3rd Circuit’s solicitude for the tender feelings of corporations might well eviscerate one of the core purposes of FOIA, but given the Supreme Court’s solicitude for the First Amendment rights of corporations in Citizens United, perhaps it’s time to recognize that for purposes of privacy rights, corporations are now people, too.
This growing deference to trembling corporate sensitivity would be merely amusing were it not for the fact that, as the idea of corporate privacy and dignity catches hold in the American judiciary, basic notions of privacy and dignity for actual human beings seem to be on the wane. I am thinking here, just for instance, of an Oklahoma statute that would make available on the Internet identifying information about women who have obtained an abortion. (An earlier version of the bill was struck down, but it was hastily enacted again.) The purpose of the Oklahoma law is to embarrass, harass, and stigmatize women seeking abortions—the precise argument now being used to bar the disclosure of the names of campaign contributors. How can it possibly be the case that campaign contributions are entitled to a greater measure of privacy and protection from alleged opponents than the personal information of women seeking to make the most difficult and intimate decision of their lives?
Or consider the meteoric rise of whole-body imaging—machines that produce virtual strip searches of air travelers. Or the Supreme Court’s deeply weird and inconclusive holding in last year’s big electronic-privacy case, finding that state employees don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the text messages sent on government-issued pagers. Or the recent Inspector General report that found the FBI had spied on American citizens who engaged in protests, demonstrations, or other activities protected by the First Amendment. Or North Carolina’s efforts to force Amazon to disclose its customers’ purchasing habits. I could go on.
Look. Nation. You can go ahead and anthropomorphize big corporations all you want. Pretend that AT&T has delicate feelings and that Wal-Mart has a just-barely-manageable phobia of spiders. But before we extend each and every protection granted in the Bill of Rights to the good folks at ExxonMobil, I have one small suggestion: Might we contemplate what’s happened to our own individual privacy in this country in recent years? That the government should have more and more access to our personal information, while we have less and less access to corporate information defies all logic. It’s one thing to ask us to give up personal liberty for greater safety or security. It’s another matter entirely to slowly take away privacy and dignity from living, breathing humans, while giving more and more of it to faceless interest groups and corporations