Is The VPPA A New Litigation Weapon For Consumers?

On September 19, 2022, a Massachusetts District Court denied Boston Globe Media Partners LLC's (the Globe) motion to dismiss a class action suit brought against it in what could be a boon for consumers' demands to protect their digital privacy. The action is one of  47 proposed class actions filed since February 2022 against various companies based on their use of Meta's Pixel tracking tool.

The Globe is a multimedia organization that maintains the website bostonglobe.com requiring digital subscriptions—a requirement which includes subscribers revealing their personally identifiable information (PII). David Ambrose, representing the putative class, alleged that the Globe disclosed subscribers' information without their permission by hosting “the Facebook Tracking Pixel—a piece of code that ‘tracks the people and type of actions they take' by capturing a digital subscriber's action and sending a record of that action to Facebook.” Ambrose v. Boston Globe Media