• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, November 4, 2024

A California resident has sued Paramount for allegedly transmitting information about his online viewing activity to TikTok and Meta Platforms, via those platforms' analytics tools.

When Paramount's streaming video subscribers access videos, “the specific title of the video is transmitted to Facebook and TikTok alongside the subscribers’ persistent and unique Facebook and TikTok’s identifiers, thereby revealing their personal viewing information,” Victor Cho alleges in a class-action complaint filed late last week in the Southern District of New York.

Cho, like numerous web users who are pursuing similar claims against other online companies, alleges that Paramount's data transfers violate the Video Privacy Protection Act -- a Reagan era law that prohibits video rental companies from sharing identifiable information about consumers' video-viewing history, without their consent.

Congress passed the law in 1988, after a Washington, D.C. newspaper obtained Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's video rental history from a local store. 

Cho's complaint against Paramount comes less than three weeks after the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals -- which covers New York -- restored a lawsuit alleging that the National Basketball Association violated the video privacy law by embedding Meta Platforms' analytics tool, the Meta Pixel, on NBA.com.

The appellate judges said in that case that the 36-year-old law should be interpreted broadly.

Tech platforms are also facing lawsuits for allegedly violating privacy laws by tracking users' activity on outside sites. Among other examples, Meta Platforms was sued recently for allegedly collecting data about people's activity on four streaming services -- Paramount+, ESPN+, Hulu, and Starz.