US courts interpret the First Amendment to protect data gathering as corporate free speech.

Evidence

The United States lacks a comprehensive legal regime for regulating data ownership or, indeed, privacy more generally, with the US Constitution throwing up conflicting signals. The Fourth Amendment may impose limits on the ability of corporations and states to invade the space of the individual, if not on single occasions, then, according to the so-called Mosaic theory, through a cumulative series of actions. According to many commentators, however, its usefulness remains uncertain and highly contingent. Meanwhile, the famous First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech (compare article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights), has recently been interpreted by the US courts to protect data-gathering and data use themselves as forms of corporate free speech. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 550

Categorization

• XREF: Reversal of corporate speech protections connects to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ pattern of extending liberties to serve elite interests while still reading as free-speech absolutism. — connects to: Privacy matters beyond secrecy because surveillance of legal acts chills free expression — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 619; First Amendment jurisprudence has been used to advance a conservative-libertarian judicial agenda — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 350; Google’s leaders leveraged First Amendment claims as legal shelter for surveillance inventions — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 349 (+4 more)
• SEED: Angle: how rights designed to protect individuals get re-read to protect corporate extraction — a genealogy from speech to data-gathering as ‘speech’.

Broader Connections

• Privacy matters beyond secrecy because surveillance of legal acts chills free expression #complicates (0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 619
• Google’s leaders leveraged First Amendment claims as legal shelter for surveillance inventions #exemplifies (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 349
• Corporations invoke a self-claimed right to extract data from human bodies #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 783
• US law’s surveillance-capitalist allegiance may not be permanent #qualifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 190
• Corporate political expenditures gained full free-speech protection in 2010 #exemplifies (0.72) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 298
• First Amendment jurisprudence has been used to advance a conservative-libertarian judicial agenda #corroborates (0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 350
• Under Citizens United logic only corporations merit full legal rights #corroborates (0.70) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 386