Woman Sues Blockbuster for Facebook Privacy Violations

Chris Blanc writes "A Texas woman has sued Blockbuster over its activities relating to Facebook's Beacon tool. The movie rental service has been reporting user activity to Facebook since Beacon launched last November, which the plaintiff says is a violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act."

Comments

More and more problems

[jmpeax]

Social networking sites, and Facebook in particular, seem to be increasingly undesirable.

Apart from not wanting people such as potential employers to gain access to profiles that are by default made openly accessible, security vulnerabilities are particularly worrying, given the fact that social networking accounts often contain detailed personal information in context (i.e. not just a name, but a name connected to a university, email account, other people, images etc.) Add to that advertising schemes that intentionally deliver users' data to third-parties, and you have a dangerous mix, especially considering the average user's lack of awareness regarding safe-guarding personal data.

Blockbuster makes you waive that

[Animats]

Blockbuster's user agreement includes a wavier of your rights under the Video Privacy Protection Act. That's why I don't shop there.

Re:Blockbuster makes you waive that

[ark1]

Just beacause it is in the contract does not mean it is legal.

Re:Blockbuster makes you waive that

[Anonymous Coward]

Blockbuster's user agreement includes a wavier of your rights under the Video Privacy Protection Act. That's why I don't shop there.

not sure how it works in the U.S.A, but here in New Zealand, you *cannot* contract yourself out of the law. e.g: if an employment contract you sign states you waive the right to opt out of working on public holidays, that clause does not apply. Surely you'd have something similar in the states?

Re:Blockbuster makes you waive that

[TheRedSeven]

Parent is not correct, at least according to the website:

From the privacy policy

Legal Notices--Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. Blockbuster supports the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 and will use reasonable commercial efforts to require employee and business partner compliance with the Act.

Now, that's pretty vague, but if you take it at face value (HAH!), it would imply that they don't have you waive your rights under this law.

However, they do have some pretty crappy privacy when it comes to any comments you post to their website (ratings and such): From the TOS:

Content submitted to blockbuster.com (including your name) will not be confidential and may be published or disclosed in Blockbuster's sole discretion, without any compensation to you.

By submitting Content, you grant Blockbuster the right to use your submitted name in connection with your Content.

I may just be going back to Netflix...

Re:'A Texas Woman'?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe her name is Debbie, and she's from Dallas. Google should get you the rest.

Yes but it's illegal.

[goombah99]

Your right to privacy on video rental records used to be dictated by what ever agreement you had or lacked. But then Robert Bork was nominated to the supreme court. At that time a reporter obtained his video rental history and published it. The politically charged backlash created a federal law mandating the privacy of those records.

In otherwords, video rental records have a protected status that is federally recognized. it's not the same as most other information about you. it might even be more protected than your credit history!

Now this is a civil suit ($$$) not a prosecution, so that law is only out there saying what the standard of conduct expected of blockbuster is and is not a direct factor in the trial. I would guess that block busters agreements reasonably allow them to share your data with 3rd party business affiliates or for purposes of debt collection. However, I think the expectation is that your records are not public records.

Facebook might be the loosely defined bussiness affiliate, but most people would probably say it's public. And you did not really intend to direct them to share your borrowing records, nor at the time you agreed with facebook to share certain data could you have anticipated that blockbuster would become a bussiness affiliate. They really needed to negotiate that with you.

finally just because you sign a "wavier" does not mean you cannot sue. As I understand it, you can never sign away your right to sue. The wavier simply makes it hard to win.

I note that recently Netflix ran into a problem too. Their supposedly anonymized rental records used in their contest to improve movie selection turns out to have enough information content that clever googling can re-associate names with a large fraction of the people in the data base. (e.g. they mention movies they watched somewhere on the web and this can be correlated). Some group in texas actually did the reverse calculations and showed it worked.