Unlike intellectual property, the new right amounts to a claim of ownership of facts and ideas. Unlike defamation, which lets you sue when someone disseminates false information, a right to own or control information about oneself gives you a veto power over truthful information. And, unlike intellectual property law, an expanded view of privacy is not sanctioned by the Constitution. Within U.S. legal history, there is little support for the concept that people own information about themselves and much support for the idea that facts and ideas and opinions are and should remain free to be communicated. This observation holds even as the focus of privacy has shifted from journalism to business.
Journalist too is a commercial enterprise.
And what has not been well-recognized by policymakers is the extent to which businesses, like journalists, rely on the freedom of information to produce goods and services, and the extent to which consumers rely on information produced by commercial enterprises to learn about those products. In fact, these broad principles are a radical and extreme departure from the American tradition of the free flow of information. Writing broad privacy principles into a law for the commercial sector would amount to a sudden massive expansion of copyright or defamation law, a step that Congress would not dream of. The evolution of formal information networks such as consumer credit reporting has important benefits for the public as a whole. Even the poor or those who are not well known in a given community may buy on credit, a relatively recent and beneficial development.