Hulu Privacy Case: Should Users Be Concerned About Video Playlists?
By emeadows
September 7, 2012
September 7, 2012
- A California judge rejected Hulu’s motion in August to dismiss a lawsuit regarding the sharing of its users’ viewing habits. “The Hulu privacy case is now one step closer to trial, and the question of who can share your video playlist is about to break wide open,” according to ReadWriteWeb.
- “The plaintiffs, a handful of Hulu users in what is now a class action suit, argued that by contracting with a tracking company called KISSmetrics to install code that revived deleted cookies and shared viewing records and personal data with the third parties like Google Analytics, DoubleClick, and Scorecard Research, the video streaming service went beyond expected uses of browsing data,” explains the post. “Instead, the plaintiffs argued, Hulu’s actions amounted to a ‘hack’ of their online experience.”
- Companies like Hulu and Netflix are currently trying to get the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) changed. “The VPPA, the argument goes, puts video streaming businesses at a serious disadvantage on the social web, especially when you compare them to, say, audio streamers like Pandora and Spotify,” notes ReadWriteWeb.
- According to Hulu, even under the current VVPA, providing companies like Google with user data is just “incident to the ordinary course of business,” which is permissible under the law.
- However, the judge “decided that whether Hulu’s sharing of user data is an ‘ordinary’ part of its video streaming business is a question of fact, not law — precisely the sort of thing trials are meant to determine,” suggests the post.
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