PBS Says SDNY Dismissal Backs Its Own Motion to Dismiss VPPA Claims
PBS sought leave Tuesday to file a notice of supplemental authority documenting the Southern District of New York’s dismissal Feb. 17 of a Video Privacy Protection Act complaint in Martin v. Meredith (docket 1:22-cv-04776), alleging the same VPPA claim plaintiff…
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Jazmine Harris is asserting against PBS, said its motion (docket 1:22-cv-02456) in U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia in Atlanta. The plaintiff in Martin alleged Meredith violated the VPPA by placing the Meta pixel code on People.com webpages containing video content, it said. The plaintiff alleged that when visiting such a webpage, a user’s Facebook ID and the webpage URL containing the name of a video available on that webpage were transmitted to Meta via its pixel, which the plaintiff claimed was a disclosure of personally identifiable information (PII) under the VPPA for revealing that the user requested or obtained a video, it said. In dismissing the complaint, the Martin court said the alleged transmissions didn’t qualify as PII under the VPPA, it said. Even for webpages containing a video, sending the URL doesn’t identify a person as having requested or obtained the video on the page since the person may instead have merely reviewed an article on the page or opened the page and done nothing more, the Martin court said. The court “thus agreed with and adopted a ground for dismissal that PBS presents in its motion to dismiss” the Harris complaint, said the motion. As demonstrated in PBS’ motion to dismiss, the Harris allegations “support, at most, only the disclosure of a webpage containing both video and non-video content,” it said. “Harris thus fails to allege that the data allegedly transmitted to Meta shows a user requesting or obtaining a specific video from the PBS website, as required to state a claim under the VPPA,” it said. “For this reason, Martin supports the dismissal of the Harris complaint” against PBS, said the motion.