AT&T Case Asks High Court to Assign Privacy Rights to Companies | Hacker News Reader

AT&T Case Asks High Court to Assign Privacy Rights to Companies

businessweek.com

40 pointsgrellas32 comments

In the last year or two I remember reading about a UK company who sucessfully argued for either a right to privacy or a right not to have specific information published. This information was about some horrendous pollution that the company was responsible for in Africa, and iirc only came to light because it was picked up by a member of parliament and read into Hansard where it was subsequently picked up by social media.

I tried searching but couldn't come up with anything as I don't remember the name of the company or who was involved.

If my memory serves me correctly, this was an example of exactly why corporations shouldn't be granted the same rights as actual humans.

I believe it's this case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafigura#Super-injunction

That's the one, ta.

That would be Trafigura. The British press was banned from reporting it (and still is). So they handed their material over to foreign presses in hopes that they would carry on reporting it.

Actually,

Neither a corporation nor an individual should have the right to cover up something like that.

That's one of the controversies with English libel law in general, which is fairly strong, applies a burden of proof to the person accused of libel, and doesn't have truth as an absolute defense.

Upvoted for not saying "UK libel law" :-)

You're right, probably better to say that it's a reason why corporates shouldn't be given the right to privacy except for trade secrets and the like.

For a second, I thought this was an Onion article about a spicy TMZ story or something...

A publicly traded company could have a "right to privacy"? What a country.

Well, many of them have confidential info about stuff like products in development.

So if your secret recipe contains 11 herbs, spices, and a pinch of dioxin that should be confidential?

That's a different issue than what is described in the article. What AT&T seems to be asking for is a "freedom from embarrassment", rather than a protection of trade secrets.

With all these privileges corporations are seeking and getting, I want to know when CEOs and other decision makers will also get the responsibilities of society enforced on them?

ie. going to prison for things like killing a bunch of people on the BP platform and tons and tons of wildlife. I mean even for a few months? Why are they sleeping comfortable in their beds every night plotting their next dollar?

BP, Worldtrans, Haliburton, not a single person has served a single day.

But try pouring a quart of oil off your curb while the neighbors watch and see how many months you serve in prison.

Blackwater, DynCorp, CACI and Titan Corp, not a single day in prison.

Technically corporations can be convicted of criminal offenses just like regular people can, but the penalties don't make much sense. They end up just getting fines, since it's difficult to send the corporation itself to jail.

There was a 1980s case where a company (Allegheny Bottling Co.) was convicted of an offense with jail time, and the judge imposed a suspended sentence with probation, with a probation condition being that top executives spend their 40 hours a week doing community service. That was overturned on appeal, though, with the appeals court recognizing that the trial court had something of a dilemma (the corporation had been convicted of a crime with a sentence that in practice could not be imposed), but said that that form of "corporate probation" was too much of a stretch, and that it was up to Congress to figure out what to do about it.

People also occasionally propose a three-strikes equivalent for corporations, where three criminal convictions leads to revocation of the corporate charter. The fundamental problem is that criminal penalties are supposed to have both deterrent and incapacitating effects: the threat of jail time is supposed to be a strong enough sanction to deter people who wouldn't be deterred by mere fines, and actual incarceration physically restrains people from committing more offenses during the time they're locked up. How does one both deter corporations from violating laws, and incapacitate those that do?

So basically the formula is, if you are going to commit a crime, make sure you form a corporation around it first. It literally shields you from prison time.

I wonder just how many people have to obviously die from someone's risky decision, hiding behind a corporation, for someone to serve even one day. The BP disaster sets the bar pretty high for everyone to walk away scot-free, the idea that one day there will be some other kind of event even worse than that is pretty scary.

Oversimplification. You obviously cannot form a corporation then commit any arbitrary crime and escape judgment. And there have been a number of cases where a corporate executive has committed criminal misconduct that they have been sent to jail for. It's what there is no particular person to whom blame can obviously be assigned where the problem we're discussing comes to pass.

>It's what there is no particular person to whom blame can obviously be assigned where the problem we're discussing comes to pass.

Actually, it's rather easy. The CEO collects the biggest paycheck, nail the responsibility to them. Greatest profits should come with the greatest risk.

Parent means you have to have lots of cash.

Note, that corps. can claim a tax break for fines, as being a 'business expense'. Much more depth on all of this in the documentary 'The Corporation'.

Fines or penalties paid by a company for violation of a law are not deductible for federal taxes.

Section 162(f) -> http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/26/usc_sec_26_00000162----...

IRS Publication 535 (2009) (Although not authoritative, it provides examples) -> http://www.irs.gov/publications/p535/ch11.html

>Technically corporations can be convicted of criminal offenses just like regular people can, but the penalties don't make much sense. They end up just getting fines, since it's difficult to send the corporation itself to jail.

Why is that?

Just pretend that the corporation is legally in jail, and apply all restrictions that that includes. No internet, phone, rights to profit, etc.

It would hurt them just as much as a person if it were actually carried out.

Prior to calling for the scalps of someone peripherally involved in an incident, I think engineers should pause and reflect as to whose finger is going to be physically on the "go" button directly before something important breaks at their company.

Captain Planet -- where all environmental damage was caused by acts of malice by identifiable people -- made for a great TV show... when we were eight.

Sure that's one extreme that makes it look silly.

But don't you think when there is a decision to pursue an extremely risky behavior (ie. drilling in the gulf, running private armies in foreign battles, selling derivatives) and when that risk literally blows up and kills people, SOMEONE should pay? Perhaps the people who pushed for that risk?

I mean there are other ways to make money that do not endanger lives, these people decided that there was zero risk to them personally so to heck with playing it safe and instead risked other people.

It's easy to make a case that "SOMEONE should pay" if you cherrypick examples but most cases aren't that simple.

What if you make pacemakers that save millions of lives but one day there's a software update that ends up killing a thousand people? Who's the "SOMEONE that should pay?" The developer who coded the bug? The analyst who misunderstood the use case and wrote the wrong requirement? The Quality Assurance team that tested the code and said it was A-OK? The software department head who signed off on the release?

In the real world, the cause of most lethal mistakes are shades of gray, not black and white as you imply.

BS, someone has to bear the responsibility of decisions and policies made and approved. If this sort of thing keeps happening and CEO's point the finger at underlings, well then maybe people will start getting wise on the social responsibility of the places that they work at. Or maybe the CEOs need to go to jail and learn that they can't keep shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Deal with it."

Maybe we need people to go to jail in a society for wrong doings in order to prevent pathological behavior from becoming the norm.

> going to prison for things like killing a bunch of people on the BP platform and tons and tons of wildlife. I mean even for a few months? Why are they sleeping comfortable in their beds every night plotting their next dollar?

There's nothing stopping the govt from prosecuting folks who made the relevant decisions. They just choose not to. No law can change that - prosecutorial discretion and all that.

Occasionally individual prosecutions do happen. The CEO of worldcom, Ebbers, was sentenced to 25 years. Some of the Enron folks served time as well.

If it passes, I would imagine this gets repealed when a company tries to invoke its right to privacy during an audit. Tax or otherwise.

Individuals don't have a right of privacy during audits, either.

The key is to pour the quart of oil off somebody else's curb, not in your neighborhood.

I'm quite certain the BP CEO did not own any residential gulf-front property along the Gulf of Mexico.

Very related post/discussion I made (no link karma for it, as if reddit karma were worth anything): http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/f1l79/instead_of...

tl;dr: For fuck's sake, nail the responsibility to the CEO. If they don't like it, they can steer the company into the moral high road. Secondly, Yes, the CEO. They take credit for when the company does well, so let them take credit for when it does reprehensible things.

So they want "Corporate Free Speech" and now "Right to privacy".....

If corporations are people, and you can't own people... then every stockholder is a Slave owner and the Stock exchange is the largest slave market ever.

If corporations are so much like people, how come they can be bought and sold?

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