The Supreme Court will hear a case about whether Paramount breached the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by sharing a user’s viewing history with Facebook. The dispute, Michael Salazar v. Paramount Global, turns on how the statute defines the term “consumer.”
In 2022 Salazar brought a class-action suit against Paramount, claiming it “violated the VPPA by disclosing his personally identifiable information to Facebook without consent,” according to Salazar’s petition to the Supreme Court. He had signed up for an email newsletter on 247Sports.com, a Paramount-owned site, providing his email address during registration. He then watched videos on 247Sports.com while logged into his Facebook account.
The petition says, “As a result, Paramount disclosed his personally identifiable information—including his Facebook ID and which videos he watched—to Facebook.” It states the disclosures happened automatically because of a Facebook Pixel Paramount placed on its website. According to the filing, Facebook and Paramount used that information to build and show targeted advertising, which boosted their revenues.
The 1988 law defines consumer as “any renter, purchaser, or subscriber of goods or services from a video tape service provider.” The term “video tape service provider” is described to include suppliers of “prerecorded video cassette tapes or similar audio visual materials,” which suggests it may apply to more than just sellers of tapes.
Salazar’s petition explains the legal question for the Supreme Court “is whether the phrase ‘goods or services from a video tape service provider,’ as used in the VPPA’s definition of ‘consumer,’ refers to all of a video tape service provider’s goods or services or only to its audiovisual goods or services.” The Supreme Court granted his petition to review the case in an orders list released yesterday.
