• by Wendy Davis , 4 hours ago

A federal judge in New York has thrown out a lawsuit by a North Carolina resident who alleged that HGTV.com disclosed her video-viewing information to Meta, via its tracking pixel.

In a decision issued late last week, U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Castel in the Southern District of New York ruled that the allegations in the complaint -- even if proven true -- wouldn't show that the website transmitted "personally identifiable" information to Meta's Facebook.

The ruling stems from a class-action complaint brought in October 2024 by Winston-Salem resident Constance Simon against Scripps Networks. (The complaint names Scripps Networks as the defendant; HGTV.com is currently owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.)

Simon alleged that she watched videos on HGTV.com, and that the website disclosed the titles of the videos she saw and other data, including an encrypted Facebook ID, to Meta.

The complaint claimed that these alleged disclosures violated the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, a 1988 law that prohibits "video tape service providers" from disclosing consumers' personally identifiable viewing history to third parties, without consumers' consent.

Simon is one of numerous online video users who have recently sued streaming video providers for allegedly embedding analytics tools like the Meta Pixel on their websites.

HGTV.com -- which said in court papers that it removed the Meta pixel from its website in March 2022 -- urged Castel to dismiss the lawsuit at an early stage for several reasons. Among others, the company argued that pixels don't transmit personally identifiable information because the information in a pixel wouldn't allow an "ordinary person" to identify a user like Simon and figure out which videos she watched.

Castel agreed, noting that the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals -- which handles appeals from New York district courts -- ruled this year in two separate cases that the National Football League and TrillerTV didn't violate the federal video privacy law by transmitting pixels to Meta.

"Courts in this district have uniformly concluded that those decisions preclude claims like the one alleged by Simon here," he wrote.

Detrina Solomon, who sued TrillerTV, has asked the Supreme Court to hear her appeal. That application is currently pending.