Report from MediaPost
In Brief – District Court Judge Casey Pitts has rejected LinkedIn’s motion to dismiss a class-action complaint that the company violated the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by allegedly sharing a user’s video-viewing history with Meta through a tracking pixel. The suit was filed by a paid subscriber to LinkedIn Premium who claims that the professional networking company disclosed her Facebook ID to Meta and the names of the LinkedIn Learning videos she watched. LinkedIn argued that the suit should be dismissed because its primary business does not involve displaying videos, and that a “reasonable ordinary person” could not link Cole’s video-watching history to her identity. In his order, Pitts writes that other judges in the Northern District of California have allowed plaintiffs to proceed with video privacy claims against companies that regularly deliver video content regardless of their primary corporate purpose, and that the plaintiff plausibly alleged the disclosure of personally identifiable information. The judge noted that LinkedIn raised factual questions that would be dealt with later.
Context – A wave of VPPA class action lawsuits has been filed against companies with websites that include video clips and used embedded analytics tools like Meta’s Pixel. A 2024 decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate a VPPA lawsuit against the NBA based on an expansive definition video “consumer” under the law gave life to other litigation, but several district judges in the Second Circuit have since rejected VPPA suits arguing that an “ordinary person” could not interpret the data, a position later backed by the appeals court in a case targeting the NFL. The lawsuit against the NBA was then dismissed a second time, on the news grounds. The NBA’s appeal to the Supreme Court to review the initial Second Circuit appeals court ruling, arguing a circuit split on VPPA cases, is still pending. In California, plaintiffs often allege that the Meta Pixel violates California’s pre-internet wiretap law as well. US District Judge Vince Chhabria recently threw out one such claim, described the state wiretap law as “a total mess,” and called for state lawmakers to rewrite it.