• by Wendy Davis , 8 hours ago

The TED Foundation must face claims that it violated the federal privacy law by allegedly disclosing website users' identifiable information and video-viewing history to outside analytics companies, a federal judge ruled.

The ruling, issued Tuesday by U.S. District Court Judge Dale Ho in the Southern District of New York, came in a lawsuit brought in October 2023 by four people who said they created free accounts with TED (standing for “Technology, Entertainment, Design”) and then viewed TED Talks videos on mobile apps or the web.

The plaintiffs alleged in a class-action complaint that TED's apps and website shared users' names, email addresses, user IDs and titles of videos viewed with third-party analytics companies.

TED asked Ho to dismiss the complaint before trial for several reasons.

The nonprofit made several arguments, including that even if the allegations in the complaint were proven true, they wouldn't show that TED violated the 38-year-old Video Privacy Protection Act. That law prohibits video providers from disclosing consumers' personally identifiable video-viewing history without their consent.

TED contended that the plaintiffs weren't "consumers," essentially arguing that people who sign up for free accounts shouldn't be considered consumers for purposes of the Video Privacy Protection Act.

Ho rejected that argument, noting that the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that in a different dispute over the video privacy law that web users who give personal data to companies are considered consumers.

The Supreme Court said this week it will review that 2nd Circuit ruling, which stemmed from a video privacy lawsuit against the National Basketball Association. The Supreme Court's decision in that matter could affect the ultimate outcome of the suit against TED. 

TED also argued that the Video Privacy Protection Act violates the First Amendment by restricting the disclosure of truthful speech.

Ho rejected that argument as well, ruling that the law "closely drawn to advance the protection of user privacy without overly burdening TED’s speech rights."

"The law applies only to video service providers and restricts their disclosure only of an individual’s video-viewing history," he wrote.

He added that the statute merely prohibits disclosure without users' permission.

"If TED added a checkbox during account creation that required approval of TED’s sharing of video-viewing history, the [Video Privacy Protection Act] would no longer bar those disclosures," he wrote.