No VPPA Liability For Disclosure Of Certain Anonymous Digital Identifiers

Another court has contributed to the ongoing debate over the scope of the term "personally identifiable information" under the Video Privacy Protection Act – a statute enacted in 1988 to protect the privacy of consumers' videotape rental and purchase history but lately applied to the modern age of video streaming services and online video viewing. Generally speaking, the term "personally identifiable information" (or PII) is not limited to only disclosure of a consumer's name, but courts and litigants have wrestled over how to define the scope, particularly with respect to the disclosure of digital identifiers such as Android or Roku device IDs or other tracking information stored by website cookies. This past week, the Third Circuit ruled that certain digital identifiers collected from web users did not qualify as PII under the statute.