The U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 26 agreed to hear a consumer’s class action lawsuit alleging a company violated federal law by sharing his personal information.
The court will decide how a 1988 privacy law forbidding disclosure of consumers’ videotape rental histories applies to digital videos viewed on a free website.
In the intervening years, consumer rentals of physical videotapes have all but disappeared, but two lower courts have held that the statute covers digital downloads.
In a class action, a plaintiff sues on behalf of a larger group of people who claim to have suffered the same injury at the hands of a defendant.
The court granted the petition in Salazar v. Paramount Global in an unsigned order. No justices dissented. The court did not explain its ruling.
Specifically, the court agreed to review a lower court’s ruling holding that the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) may not be used to sue a sports website for giving Facebook a consumer’s video-watching history.
In his lawsuit, petitioner Michael Salazar alleged that Paramount, which owns 247Sports.com, violated the act by handing over his personally identifiable information to Facebook without his consent.
Salazar accepted a digital subscription to 247Sports.com by registering for its online newsletter and viewing 247Sports videos while logged into Facebook.
Facebook and Paramount used his information to target him with advertising, which boosted their revenues, according to Salazar’s petition.
Video Privacy Protection Act
The VPPA protects consumers from unauthorized disclosure of their video viewing information.
Congress passed the law after a newspaper in 1987 leaked the video rental history of former President Ronald Reagan’s then-Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in an effort to discredit him, according to the petition.
The act forbids a “videotape service provider” from knowingly disclosing “personally identifiable information concerning any consumer of such provider.”
Its definition of “consumer” includes a “subscriber of goods or services from a videotape service provider,” according to the petition.
Lower courts in the case assumed that Paramount was a “videotape service provider.”
Paramount asked a federal district court to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that Salazar was not a consumer as defined by the act.
The court granted the motion with prejudice, meaning that Salazar was barred from refiling the lawsuit.
It held that to be a consumer under the act, Salazar would have to show that he “accessed audiovisual content through the newsletter,” the petition states.
Salazar appealed, but before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit could rule, two other circuit courts held that subscribing to a newsletter from a videotape service provider makes a user a consumer under the VPPA.
One of the circuit court’s rulings was in a similar, separate case brought by Salazar against the National Basketball Association (NBA), according to the petition.
After that, a divided Sixth Circuit panel reached a different conclusion, ruling against Salazar in his lawsuit against Paramount.
The panel found that even though Salazar subscribed to Paramount’s newsletter, the law concerns only “goods or services provided by a company when it is acting as a ‘videotape service provider’—[providing] ‘audiovisual materials.’”
The panel held that the statute treats someone as a consumer “only when he subscribes to ‘goods or services’ in the nature of ‘video cassette tapes or similar audio visual materials” and that the Paramount newsletter did not meet this legal test, according to the petition.
Paramount filed a brief urging the high court to reject the petition, saying that Salazar was “trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.”
The company stated that the Sixth Circuit ruled correctly.
Even though lower courts have sometimes disagreed about why the VPPA doesn’t apply to claims related to accessing free ad-supported video clips on websites, they do agree it doesn’t apply, according to the brief.
The brief states that the Supreme Court should allow the various pending cases to continue developing in lower courts, instead of granting review at this point “when the circuit conflict is only abstract and does not actually lead to different ultimate outcomes on materially identical facts.”
SCOTUS Declines to Hear Similar Case
The granting of the petition came after the Supreme Court decided last month not to hear the NBA’s appeal in another class action Salazar brought.
Salazar claimed that the NBA violated the statute when it disclosed his personal information and viewing history to Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta.
Salazar said that after he subscribed to the NBA’s free email newsletter and watched videos on the league’s website, it sent his viewing history to Facebook when he was logged into Facebook.
He alleged that Meta used it to target him with Facebook ads.
A federal district court ruled he lacked standing to sue.
Standing is the right of someone to sue in court. The parties must show a strong enough connection to the claim to justify participating in a lawsuit.
The Second Circuit reversed, holding that Salazar may sue because he met VPPA’s definition and because he subscribed to the newsletter.
The Supreme Court has not yet scheduled oral argument in Salazar v. Paramount Global.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Jan. 26, 2026, in The Epoch Times.