Corporate personhood is the idea that a corporation is legally a person. It has (some) rights, it can be sued, etc. This is useful in many cases. As the "If Corporations Are People, They Should Act Like It" article points out, it means that the government can't just barge in and seize all of Google's servers, because Google is protected with the Fourth Amendment rights to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures.
There are other legal benefits of corporate personhood pointed out in that article. For example, if a corporation harms an individual or group of individuals, those individuals can sue the company directly. The company has a much bigger pot of money to dole out than all of its executives combined. Therefore, the plaintiffs actually stand a chance to recover what they've lost.
Recently, however, some more dubious rights have been awarded to corporations; namely the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. This has huge social and ethical impacts on society, because elections are now more than ever influenced by which ever groups have the most money. I think awarding this right of unlimited spending to companies (and individuals, for that matter) was a terrible mistake. However, this mistake is separate from the idea of corporate personhood. We can easily have a society where corporations are treated mostly as people, but cannot spend unlimited amounts of money on a campaign; in fact, we've had that society for most of America's existence.
Ethically, the results of corporate personhood overall are more difficult to sort out. As the "How Corporations Got The Same Rights As People (But Don’t Ever Go To Jail)" article points out, corporations are recognized as not having a soul. So they aren't really expected to do the "right" thing, just whatever makes them the most money. This view causes problems, however.
For example, Sony was unethical when it installed a rootkit on millions of devices. The idea was to enforce copy protection. However, this software ate up users CPU and made computers more vulnerable to attacks. Furthermore, it was nearly impossible to remove. I think this is akin to selling a little robot along with the CD that would constantly buzz around the house and zap you whenever you tried to copy something you shouldn't. That seems wildly unethical, and I don't see how that situation is any different than the rootkit version.
However, I don't think Sony was sufficiently punished. Sure, they had to pay a fine, but it didn't seem to hurt them as a corporation. If a person committed that sort of hacking scheme and was caught, they would likely spend much of their life in jail. In comparison, Sony seemed to hardly be hurt. Most of the retribution seemed to come in the form of extra-legal hacks. I think this is the largest problem with the way corporate personhood is dealt with in practice. The company pays a fine and most of the employees at fault don't get punished as they should.
Overall, companies get the same rights as individuals. So shouldn't Sony (and companies like them) have just been more ethical in the first place, like individuals generally are? What Sony did was illegal as well as unethical, but what if it had just been unethical? Would that have been wrong since corporations are treated as people?
I would argue no, under current law. Corporations are treated as people mainly out of convenience, not because they actually act as people. The current law requires corporations to respect the desires of their shareholders first. And the shareholders of public corporations just want their stock to increase in value. So companies are legally encouraged to care only for maximizing shareholder wealth. (I'm taking a Corporate Finance class this semester. This is exactly what we are taught the role of a financial manager is: maximize shareholder wealth).
This idea needs to change if we are to expect corporations to be ethical. Perhaps new regulations are in order. Perhaps more ordinary employees and stockholders should serve on the board of companies. I don't know how to make companies more ethical, but some sort of legislative change is needed if we are to expect companies to care about anything other than maximizing profit.
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