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VHS-Era Privacy Law Still Causing Headaches For Streaming Video
jfruh (300774) writes "The Video Privacy Protection Act, a 1988 law that made it illegal for a video store to share your rental history, has thrown up roadblocks for modern-day streaming video sites. Last year Congress amended the law to make it possible for you to share your Netflix viewing history with your social media friends, as long as you opt in. But what does "opting in" entail? Hulu is now on the receiving end of a lawsuit over the fact that clicking the Facebook "like" button on a viewing page shares that viewing activity on Facebook."
This is not a case of an outdated law holding a company from doing a good thing. This is a case of a law being accuratly applied to prevent companies from sharing personal information without any reasonable expectation of assent.
I mean come on, can anyone say with a straight face that standing in a punlic forumn and saying outloud that you pizza gives pizza hut permission to share your purchase and order history?
So our video viewing preferences are rigidly protected by big government but if we want to peaceably assemble to demonstrate and protest we must be confined to a chain-link fenced "free speech zone" in a parking lot somewhere in an out of the way industrial zone.
More like some Congressman doesn't want his wife to find out about all the midget porn.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I, for one, dislike my history being sold to other merchants. Even if it means I pay more for a service, privacy has value. I slways opt-out, but this sort of marketing is deeply invasive and subject to NSA-esque abuse in targetted cases.
Imagine a world where privacy is the default setting. Truly mind blowing.
After I RTFA, it appears the author's stance is "you gave Hulu permission by clicking Like, after all Like is supposed to let you tell people what you like. Thus, HULU should not be held responsible under the law for sharing your viewing history." My issue with that is, if I understand what HULU did, is clicking Like shares anything you watched and what you are watching, not just the original video, essentially making your history available without your consent. That is exactly what the law is designed to prevent. I find it a big jump from saying "I Like "Allo Allo S1E4" and taking that is "I consent to let you share my entire viewing history."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
If at all there is something to complain about, it is the fact that we did not use the law to extend VHS rentals to web browsing history and stop sites from storing, selling and buying the browsing history of the visitors. Had we extended this law earlier to logically include all the thing that ought to be private and unstorable by thirdparties and service providers, the world might be a better place today.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So now that they are finding ways to make money out of selling this info, the video companies want to change old regulations. F*** them! I don't want them doing business with my personal information if they don't want me to keep temporary copies of their movies and I have to deal with all their DRM mess.
If you value your privacy, DON'T USE FACEBOOK YOU FUCKING IDIOTS!
somebody mod parent to +10
Nah, spelling errors would get him a +3 max.
Grammar error - take it down a notch more.
This is a tough crowd.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
kinda off topic to but I still have some Disney Movies on VHS. The last one came out in 1998. Quality is pretty good. Only problem is that I can't quickly skip chapters to go to my favorite scenes.
What the hell do you expect to happen when you click "like" on something? You are intentionally making your opinion public. That's the entire point of a "like" button.
Except that in this case it's more accurately "going to a pizza parlor, finding out that they have a little flag in the pepperoni pizza portion of the menu that you can stick on your lawn that says 'I like peperoni pizza', putting that flag on your lawn, and then suing the pizza company for having the lawn flag available."
Though in reality, r'ing tfa hints that it may hinge more on the fact that the inclusion of a like button on the page at all automatically shares with Facebook the fact that you were even on the page due to referrer information. The 'Like' button itself is not Hulu sharing the data with Facebook, that's the clicker sharing the data with Facebook.
@Whee
If you stay away from all these social networking sties you are taking a HUGE chunk of your privacy back. Granted your browsing habits are tracked and the NSA is tracking it, recording all your phone calls etc....
Now a message for Big Brother:
HEY NSA - are you reading this!? To the goon reading this - F$%^ YOU and BTW your mother was GREAT in bed last night! Boy she sucks a mean c0ck! And he swallowing was a HUGE plus!
Now back to our regularly scheduled message...
Wish this law would be extended to other products and services like DVD purchases, retail purchases, library check outs, grocery purchases, restaurant orders etc.. This law is only a headache, if you're out to commit a crime (invasion of privacy).
FYI --
This law came about cuz Newt Gingrich was outed renting porno videos, so the law was passed to shield politicians from criticism regarding their "viewing habits".
> Hulu is now on the receiving end of a lawsuit over the fact that clicking the Facebook "like" button on a viewing page shares that viewing activity on Facebook."
Um, that's exactly what the "Like" button is for. I hope Hulu countersues over this stupidity and wins.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
What kind of idiot thinks clicking the Facebook like button DOESN'T tell your friends you liked something?
The law requires informed consent. Nothing in any of the described methods even comes close to that. And i did assume this was similar to how facebook uses the like flag on their own site to qualify as consent to share data. If i miss that it was just having the facebook code block on the page then that just make the egregious violation even worse.
Yes I like pizza
Any I consent you you giving out my account information.
You can't taxer my dad.
No you consented to that too
That's a good law. We need more of those.
I guess when the repeated "government doesn't understand technology" and "privacy protections are being eroded" stances collide on Slashdot, the former wins? This is a rare instances where the consumer is being protected. And it isn't hobbling streaming video one bit. It is only hobbling Hulu's ability to trick consumers into having their viewing history exposed to third parties in unexpected ways.
That's why I'm using my Beta to stream movies...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Stop using Facebook and at least 50% of your privacy problems online will never occur. Better yet, don't start to begin with.
Except that if you click a Facebook Like on ANY site, you are consenting to that like be made known on Facebook. KitFox was correct: the clicker made the share, not anyone else.
...
In the US your library records are generally confidential and will only be disclosed in response to a lawfully issued subpoena. The American Library Association has promulgated specific privacy guidelines on this issue:
http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=otherpolicies&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=13084
These rules were formulated in the 1950s in response to McCarthy era hysteria on "subversive" communist/socialist books. At that time certain governmental agencies were asking librarians to turn people in that were reading these materials without getting a court issued subpoena. How all this fairs in the modern era of the Patriot Act and the NSA is anyone's guess.
There is no link between clicking a like button and having actually rented it, unless they've restricted like buttons to customers who have rented the movie.
Click a like button is:
a) Not Hulu sharing anything, it's Facebook doing the sharing. and
b) Not your rental history anyway.
Terrorists have replaced communists. The laws you mention are old. One change enacted by the Patriot act was to track library check outs.
And this:
From fox news
The wholesale tracking of all books is suspicious. What business does the govt have knowing who read the latest Dr. Seuss books? The patriot act should have allowed tracking only those books related to terrorism -- weapon making books, books about extreme violence, etc.
There are many books a government might want their citizens to avoid, such as ones that encourage "to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them".
Documents like the DoI and books written by like-minded people could give people ideas that could be dangerous to our government.
vi? Who's that?
No...this is a case of a blatantly frivolous lawsuit. Because clicking the like button is A) A voluntary action by the user B) Clicking the like button is basically opting in, and C) The user can remove the post
Except that isn't what the issue is here. The issue is that Hulu sends the information to Facebook just by loading the like button on the page, regardless if the user ever clicks on it. The linked article gets it wrong, but the article that article links to explains it better.
Remember the American Library Association response to that part of the Patriot Act? They strongly recommended that libraries not keep such records. Librarians know who has currently checked out a particular book, and they destroy that information once it's returned.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You're daft if you think Facebook doesn't track people that don't have accounts. They do. And anytime you visit a page with a Like button, they know, even if you don't have an account. Just like Google knows whenever you visit a page that uses Google Analytics, or Google APIs, or has an embedded Google map or Youtube video. Unless you've turned off third party cookies, Facebook and Google probably have a better record of you're internet history than your browser does.