Two Circuits Narrowly Construe The Video Privacy Protection Act

In recent years, websites have faced a slew of proposed class action lawsuits over their tracking technologies. To improve user experiences and to tailor marketing, some websites use pixels, strings of code used to gather and share information about how users interact with websites. Many lawsuits challenging the sharing of that information have focused on a federal law called the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). Recent decisions from the Second Circuit and the D.C. Circuit have narrowly construed different elements of that statute. Those decisions offer early signs that judicial consensus may be shifting toward reading the VPPA more narrowly than the district courts have done to date.