Since when does a legal entity have "privacy" rights?
Since the Third Circuit said so, in its September 22, 2009 decision in AT&T v. Federal Communications Commission (No. 084024).
Most privacy practitioners would not consider a legal entity to have privacy rights. Rather, a legal entity may have trade secrets or contractual confidentiality protections. However, in its novel holding, the Third Circuit found that a corporation (AT&T) was protected by an exemption in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that applies to “unwarranted invasions of personal privacy.” Specifically, FOIA exempts “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information … could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy…”(emphasis added). This exemption, combined with FOIA’s definition of “person” to include legal entities, enabled AT&T to successfully argue that a corporation has a right to privacy. (After all, the court said, “it would be very odd indeed for an adjectival form of a defined term not to refer back to that defined term.”) As a result, AT&T’s competitors have not been able to obtain information about an FCC investigation of AT&T regarding AT&T’s alleged overcharging of some of its customers.
Whether this ruling will be followed in other FOIA cases, or used to expand the concept of privacy rights under other statutes, remains to be seen. For now, when submitting information to regulators in connection with investigations, companies should consider submitting such information as confidential, since doing so could help the company to later challenge attempts by competitors or other third parties to obtain such information from the regulator under FOIA.
This is disturbing, in that it can be anti-competitive, and it also may be abused by companies complicit with government privacy abuses to defeat FOIA's power to shed light on such abuses.
One question which comes to mind is, where is the definition of "person" in FOIA? It does not appear to be within the cited code section. Therefore we should reasonably challenge whether the specific definition of "person" used in making this judgment is really what was intended by the authors of FOIA.
Another question one might apply to this specific situation is whether, even accepting for the moment that a company can suffer a "personal" privacy harm, this harm is "unwarranted" in the context of the intent of the FOIA when used for pro-competitive purposes relating to information within a government enforcement investigative action? As with fair information privacy principles, a balance is to be struck between the competing interests - rarely is privacy absolute, and even more rarely when the possible privacy harm is "merely" commercial. In US jurisprudence, we see a parallel in the lesser protection of free commercial speech as compared to the very strong protection of free personal speech.
"Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
Corporations gained personhood through aggressive court maneuvers culminating in an 1886 Supreme Court case called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific. Until then, only We the People were protected by the Bill of Rights, and the governments the people elected could regulate corporations as they wished. But with personhood, corporations steadily gained ways to weaken government restraints on their behavior—and on their growth.
http://www.uuworld.org/2003/03/feature1a.html