The U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 8 decided not to take up the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) appeal in a consumer privacy lawsuit.

The high court dismissed the NBA’s petition in NBA v. Salazar in an unsigned order without comment. No justices dissented.

The respondent, Michael Salazar, claimed that the NBA violated federal law in disclosing his personal information, including his personal viewing history, to Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta.

The NBA offers a free email newsletter that permits fans to stay up to date on developments regarding the sports league’s teams and players. Salazar said he subscribed to the newsletter in 2022 and that he watched videos offered on the league’s website, according to the petition the NBA filed.

Salazar alleged that as he watched the videos, the NBA’s website automatically tracked his viewing activities and sent his viewing history to Facebook at times when he was also logged into his Facebook account. He alleged his NBA viewing history was forwarded to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, which in turn used that data to target him with Facebook advertisements, the petition stated.

In 2022, Salazar initiated a proposed class action against the NBA in federal district court in New York, arguing that the NBA ran afoul of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) each time its website sent a viewer’s viewing history to Meta. The statute, enacted in 1988, protects consumers from the unauthorized disclosure of their video viewing information. The law was passed by Congress after a national newspaper in 1987 leaked the video rental history of former President Ronald Reagan’s then-Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in an effort “to embarrass him while his nomination was pending,” according to the petition.

The district court granted the NBA’s motion to dismiss, finding that Salazar lacked standing to sue and did not count as a subscriber under the VPPA because he subscribed only to the league’s free newsletter, and not to its video services. Standing refers to the right of someone to sue in court. The parties must show a strong enough connection to the claim to justify their participation in a lawsuit.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed, holding both that Salazar had standing to sue and that he was a consumer within the meaning of the VPPA because he subscribed to the free email newsletter.

The NBA stated in its petition to the Supreme Court that the Second Circuit’s “ruling threatens to blow open the federal courthouse doors to all manner of lawsuits over trivialities, all while jeopardizing the data-use practices that make so much of the Internet free, accessible, and useful to consumers.”

The petition said the Second Circuit erred when it held that “consumers are always concretely harmed whenever a business discloses any information about them to anyone without their prior authorization.” The petition said the circuit court also diverged from most federal courts, which have found that “only persons who rent, buy, or subscribe to a business’s audiovisual goods and services can sue to enforce the VPPA.”

The petition said Salazar did not meet the statutory definition of a consumer because the services he utilized, basketball highlights and analysis, “are free for anyone to view on NBA.com.”

“No one has to ‘subscribe’ to the NBA to watch video clips of [athletes] LeBron James or Kevin Durant,” the petition stated.

Salazar urged the Supreme Court to deny the NBA’s petition in a brief he filed with the court, arguing that the Second Circuit’s ruling was correct.

The brief said the NBA is advocating too strict a definition of “consumer,” which should not be limited “to those who transact in videos.”

“Those who bought candy or keychains or posters at Blockbuster were its ‘consumers,’” the brief said, referencing a popular chain of video rental stores that filed for bankruptcy in 2010.

The Epoch Times reached out for comment to the NBA’s attorney and Salazar’s attorney, but did not hear back by publication time.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Dec. 8, 2025, in The Epoch Times.