Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent article in Slate about the changing nature of privacy. There’s less for you and me, and more for corporations and groups.
“Once upon a time,” she writes, “you had to be a person to assert a right to personal privacy. But more and more it seems that the demand for personal privacy flows to large blurry advocacy groups and even larger, blurrier corporations. This trend would be alarming under any circumstances. As it happens, individual privacy rights for real humans seem to be shrinking at the same time corporate privacy rights are expanding.
“Disclosure of contributors to political campaigns, and campaign advertisements, used to be an unobjectionable proposition. Now, resisting it is a matter of highest principle. Bruce Josten, executive vice president for government affairs for the United States Chamber of Commerce, told Jake Tapper, “We’re under no obligation, as any organization or association in the United States is, to divulge who its members are, who its contributors are.” Why? Explained Josten: “We’re not going to subject our contributors to harassment, to intimidation, and to threats and to invasions of privacy at their houses and at their places of business, which is what has happened every time there’s been disclosure here.”
Lithwick cites the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay marriage group, that makes the same claim. “But it’s not just advocacy groups claiming that they need to protect their members’ privacy rights from leagues of nameless nosy bullies.” It turns out that the Supreme Court has now agreed to hear a case in which AT&T evaded a Freedom of Information Act request by arguing that an exemption protecting personal privacy also applies to corporations. “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.”
Lithwick notes that while the idea of corporate privacy is expanding, the privacy rights of actual people are under attack. “Look, 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.”
Well said! Great Britain has had its own issues with creeping intrusions on privacy. Sounds like we need a movement. Of course, the truly, massively heretical notion would be to get rid of the idea that a corporation is a person. Because it ain’t–and in that legal figment lies a great many of our problems.