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Supreme Court Weighs Major Video Privacy Case

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Supreme Court Weighs Major Video Privacy Case

A 1988 federal law could bar tech companies from using video viewing data for targeted ads without explicit user consent.

It’s usually legal for an American company to gather your personal data and use it to target you with an advertisement, and many online companies rely on this to make money. But a data privacy case now before the US Supreme Court may upend the longstanding practice of personal data collection for use in targeted ads.

The case, Salazar v. Paramount Global, stems from a 2022 class action lawsuit filed by Michael Salazar. At issue is a free digital newsletter Salazar signed up for, which was published by 247Sports.com, a college sports news website owned by Paramount Global.

The website included a tracker that shared Salazar’s video viewing history with Facebook without his consent. Salazar says that Paramount did this illegally. But the federal law that Salazar says Paramount violated is a 1988 Reagan-era act governing videotape rentals. 

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork for a seat on the Supreme Court, though the nomination was famously rejected by the Senate. During Bork’s confirmation hearings, a writer for the alt-weekly Washington City Paper convinced the manager at a video rental store to slip him Bork’s video-rental history, which the paper published along with commentary on Bork’s film choices.

While Bork’s rental history was fairly boring, the story and its fallout eventually led Congress to pass the Video Privacy Protection Act. The law was created for analog media, but Salazar’s team argues that it also applies to digital media, such as website content.


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