Second Circuit Joins Judicial Trend: No VPPA Violation In Pixel-Sharing Case

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a proposed class action against Flipps Media (now Triller TV), ruling that the company did not violate the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by sharing user video-viewing data via tracking pixels. The court concluded that the data shared did not qualify as "personally identifiable information" under the VPPA because it could not be used by an ordinary person to identify an individual or their viewing habits. In other words, the panel found that the statute's focus supports a reading that only data that an ordinary person could recognize as a video title should be covered. 

This decision aligns the Second Circuit with other courts that apply a stricter "ordinary person" standard for what constitutes identifiable information under the statute. The Second Circuit panel observed that both the Third and Ninth Circuits have interpreted the VPPA's ban on disclosing personally identifiable information as