CBS.com Viewing Information Shared with Facebook Class Action

If you have a Facebook account and watch CBS video clips online, is Facebook entitled to know what you’ve watched? The complaint for this class action alleges that Paramount Global Corporation, which owns and operates CBS.com, has violated the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by disclosing the personally identifiable information (PII) of CBS.com viewers, including a record of every clip they have watched, to Facebook, without the viewers’ consent.

The class for this action is all persons in the US who have Facebook and CBS.com accounts and who viewed videos on CBS.com.

The complaint quotes Congress, when it passed the VPPA, as saying that people should be able to “maintain control over personal information divulged and generated in exchange for receiving services from video tape service providers.” It quotes Senator Patrick Leahy as saying that “[i]t is nobody’s business” what specific individuals “watch on television or read or think about when they are home[.]”

The complaint also quotes from the VPPA, prohibiting a “video tape service provider who knowingly discloses, to any person, personally identifiable information concerning any consumer of such provider.”

Facebook earns its money by selling advertising on its site. Its biggest advantage in this area, the complaint claims, is “its ability to target users. Facebook can target users so effectively because it surveils user activity both on and off its site.”

Facebook compiles information about users, including its inferences about them, in a dataset called Core Audiences. Advertisers can use this with specific filters and parameters to delineate a target audience for their advertising, or they can build Custom Audiences. The complaint alleges, “Advertisers can use a Custom Audience to target existing customers directly, or they can use it to build a ‘Lookalike Audience[]’…”

To create a Custom Audience, the advertiser must provide information to Facebook. This can be done, the complaint alleges, by the advertiser uploading information or through a Facebook tool called the Tracking Pixel. The Tracking Pixel is a piece of code that a business installs in its website that tracks visitors and their actions there, the complaint says, then sends a record to Facebook. The complaint alleges, “Once this record is received, Facebook processes it, analyzes it, and assimilates it into datasets like the Core Audiences and Custom Audiences.”

According to the complaint, the CBS.com website uses the Tracking Pixel. The complaint explains this usage in detail, then claims that Paramount “discloses this information so it can better match visitors to their Facebook profiles, which thereby allows [Paramount] to better track analytics and target its advertisements[.]”

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: News, Privacy
Tags: Collecting Personal Data Without Notice/Consent, Sharing Personal Information with Third Parties, VPPA, Your Privacy