No, please stop with this false equivalence. People get rights and benefit of the doubt. Corporations do not.

Corporations are not people. What a single person does while not affecting anyone else is nobody’s business, but what companies do affects a lot of people, hence it is other peoples’ business.

financial and corporate transparency and privacy are a very different matter to the transparency and privacy of an individual.

despite the whackadoodle precedent that corporations are people, corporations are not people. they may be made of people, but the affairs of those people are within the course of their employment, acting on behalf of the corporation.

There is a difference between keeping one's privacy and actively abusing and masquerading attorney client privilege to conceal criminal actions, knowing they are criminal actions. Because that is what Google was doing. They knew extremely well how they were violating the law and the implications.

And even worse, actively recruiting individuals to commit obstruction of justice and evidence spoliation (two distinct categories), so you as a company can thrive from crime a few more years.

The law is there to protect consumers.

Privacy law is there to protect everyone. Google could have easily said: I have the evidence, but I plead the fifth and not going to provide that evidence that you seek in discovery. The issue of course is in civil proceedings this means, the Court can instruct adverse inference or strike the pleadings -- that is a default judgment.

If anything it speaks to the volumes of times that folks are pressured into doing something that is probably illegal but they won't get whistleblower protection on.

Conflating personal privacy with corporate secrecy is arguing in bad faith.

> The cognitive dissonance must be in overdrive here!

That's overly glib. Large and megacos should be held to a higher standard than ordinary folks and small mom-and-pop shops.

A decent rule could be "If you have an army of lawyers (whether on retainer or on staff), you're presumed to have a far higher-than-normal understanding of the law relevant to your business and get far less lenience and forbearance from the courts.".

Yes, I know that's not how it works today. I'm saying that it SHOULD work that, maybe after a six or twelve month advance notice period.

It's not that, though, I understand the temptation to `sed` what they said into that. It's easier, more fun, and its much more work to come with curiosity.