IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2016 - 17

commentary

Wilhelm E.J. Klein

Can We Trust ForProfit Corporations to
Protect Our Privacy?

an we trust for-profit
corporations to protect our privacy? Are
these compatible concepts and institutions? These are difficult questions
to answer. Corporations can be
complex entities. The ones that provide the technologies, social networks, and electronic gadgets our
privacy depends on are no exception. Nevertheless, despite their
complexity, all for-profit corporations possess a couple of significant
properties that may be sufficient to
raise some doubts about their compatibility with privacy in any strong
sense. Let us turn to Milton Friedman, one of the fathers and architects of modern capitalism and its
legal and economic structures. He
introduced the fundamental characteristics of a modern for-profit
company, in an interview with Joel
Bakan for his book, aptly titled
The Corporation:

There is one (moral) imperative,
Friedman continues, which is to
increase shareholder profit.
Corporate social responsibility
in Friedman's words, is only justifiable as in so far as it takes the form
of hypocritical window dressing, as
a calculated cost to maximize profits. Genuine care, in comparison,
is costly. In this view of corporate
social responsibility, according to
Friedman, hypocrisy is rendered virtuous and genuine care immoral [1,
p. 34]. Because of a corporation's
legal and institutional boundaries,
a corporation has to do whatever
is necessary to abide by the profitmaximization imperative. As a result, as Joel Bakan concludes, a
corporation has to be understood
as pathological entity, as an

[a] corporation is the property
of its stockholders. Its interests are the interests of its
stockholders. Now, beyond
that, should it spend the stockholders' money for purposes
which it regards as socially
responsible but which it cannot connect to its bottom line?
The answer I would say is no
[1, p. 34].

"externalising machine, in
the same way that a shark is
a killing machine [...] There
isn't any question of malevolence of will; the enterprise
has within it, and the shark as
within it, those characteristics

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2592780
Date of publication: 7 September 2016

september 2016

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

that enable it to do that for
which it is designed" [1, p. 70].
(See also [2] for further discussion
of the pathological character of
corporations.)

Corporate Privacy
While Friedman was asked about
corporate social responsibility (CSR)
in this particular interview, everything he said also holds true if you
replace "CSR" with "privacy." Like
CSR, privacy can only ever be pursued by a corporation as a form
of window dressing, in an effort to
increase, and/or protect profits.
It can never be seen as an intrinsic, genuine goal in itself. This was
evidenced on a rather large scale
when Edward Snowden blew the
whistle on the current, global surveillance scheme involving numerous governmental agencies and
corporations [3]. As suggested by
Snowden's revelations, whenever
corporations were faced with the
decision to either protect the privacy and interests of their clients,

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