American Girl Website Sends Video Viewing Info to Facebook VPPA Class Action

The complaint for this class action claims that, when visitors to the www.americangirl.com website watch a video, the website reports all the details of this to Facebook. “Why?” the complaint asks. “So Facebook can bombard the person with more ads urging the person to buy products…” The complaint alleges that, in doing this, Mattel, Inc. and American Girl Brands, LLC are violating the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA).

The class for this action is all persons in the US who watched video content on Americangirl.com and whose personally identifiable information (PII) was disclosed by Mattel and American Girl Brands to Facebook during the class period.

Facebook makes money by selling ad space on its website, the complaint alleges, and one of its selling points is that it can pinpoint individual users’ interests. The complaint alleges that Facebook does this by monitoring its users’ online activity even when they are not on Facebook.

According to the complaint, Facebook offers “Custom Audiences” to advertisers that are made up of “people who have already shown interest in [their] business[.]” To gather this information, Facebook asks advertisers to give it user data from their websites, the complaint claims, “and most do so via the Facebook Tracking Pixel.”

This pixel is a bit of code that companies can add to their websites that relays information back to Facebook. “When the Facebook Tracking Pixel captures an action,” the complaint alleges, “it sends a record to Facebook, which Facebook then assimilates into the Custom Audiences dataset.” The advertisers specify the actions, or “events,” that the pixel collects.

As part of this, the complaint alleges that Mattel and American Girl send to Facebook cookies with information on the videos that users watch at their website. When the user is logged into Facebook, or even has recently logged out, the complaint alleges, the information sent includes the user’s browser and Facebook ID. (The complaint contains detailed information about the cookies and the information they relay.)

The complaint alleges, “A Facebook ID is personally identifiable information. Anyone can identify a Facebook profile—and all personal information publicly listed on that profile—by appending the Facebook ID to the end of Facebook.com.” The combination of the Facebook ID, sent together with the titles of videos watched, the complaint claims, allows Facebook—or any ordinary person—to know which videos a particular individual has watched.

In transmitting to Facebook both a user’s video viewing information and the user’s Facebook ID, the complaint alleges, Mattel and American Girl “did exactly what the VPPA prohibits: they disclosed [the user’s] video viewing habits to a third party.”

The particular plaintiff in this case has what the complaint calls “dual motivations” for watching videos on the American Girl website. According to the complaint, he is both interested in learning more about the American Girl goods and services and also a “tester” who is trying to make sure that companies do not violate the privacy rights granted by federal laws.

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Privacy
Tags: Sharing Personal Information with Third Parties, VIdeo Viewing Information, VPPA, Your Privacy