{"id":580860,"date":"2010-05-26T20:10:59","date_gmt":"2010-05-27T00:10:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100525\/1906469574.shtml"},"modified":"2010-05-26T20:10:59","modified_gmt":"2010-05-27T00:10:59","slug":"should-companies-have-a-privacy-right-to-shield-the-release-of-damaging-info","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/580860","title":{"rendered":"Should Companies Have A ‘Privacy’ Right To Shield The Release Of Damaging Info?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Should companies have privacy rights? With recent legal rulings suggesting that companies have similar legal rights<\/a> to individuals, does that include privacy rights? A bunch of groups, including Public Citizen and the EFF, have filed an amicus brief<\/a> in a case that looks into that question. The lawsuit is between the FCC and AT&T. It seems that the FCC had done an investigation where it determined that AT&T — the same company that has “helped out” the government by explaining how the feds could get around pesky oversight rules by using post-it notes<\/a> — has been over-billing the government. <\/p>\n

That seems like pretty interesting information, and some others thought so — which is why a Freedom of Information Act request was made to the FCC, and the FCC agreed to hand over the documents concerning the investigation. AT&T, in response, sued the FCC, saying that releasing this info would violate the company’s “personal privacy.” Huh? It’s hard to see how a company has “personal privacy.” You can understand not releasing confidential information that involves a trade secret, or other such information. But claiming that details of an investigation of how you may have bilked the government is “private” info seems a bit absurd. If that was the case, then any company could demand that any embarrassing information never be released.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with AT&T, suggesting that the exemption in the Freedom of Information Act for “personal privacy” does, in fact, apply to AT&T as well. The new brief urges the Supreme Court review the case:<\/p>\n


\nUnless the Supreme Court takes the case and reverses the Third Circuit decision, records about safety violations at a coal mine, environmental problems at an offshore oil rig, filthy conditions at a food manufacturing plant, financial shenanigans at an investment bank and many other records like these may be the subject of so-called corporate privacy claims that could result in agencies withholding those records from the public under FOIA.
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Should companies have privacy rights? With recent legal rulings suggesting that companies have similar legal rights to individuals, does that include privacy rights? A bunch of groups, including Public Citizen and the EFF, have filed an amicus brief in a case that looks into that question. The lawsuit is between the FCC and AT&T. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-580860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580860\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}