Shook Privacy Partner Featured in Privacy Daily Articles

Shook Partner Matthew Wolfe was featured in the August 21 and August 22 editions of Privacy Daily discussing the recent D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision in Pileggi v. Washington Newspaper and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals case Solomon v. Flipps Media.

The Pileggi v. Washington Newspaper case further widened the circuit split on the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), increasing the likelihood that the U.S. Supreme Court will review the 1988 federal statute. The plaintiff alleged the newspaper shared users’ private video viewing information from its online site with Facebook without consent. The plaintiff had a subscription to the paper’s newsletter and claimed that disclosing information violated the VPPA. The D.C. Circuit ruled for the newspaper, deciding that plaintiff was not a consumer under the statute.

“There’s definitely a litigation wave here, and everybody’s got video on their websites, so I don’t see it stopping,” Wolfe said. “We'll continue to see parties going through the language of the statute piecemeal, and litigating pieces of it one definition at a time.”

Solomon v. Flipps Media held that an average person must be able to interpret and understand the identity of a person from the personal information shared for it to be a VPPA violation. The plaintiff alleged their personal information was sent to Facebook unlawfully. Since the plaintiff’s information that was sent was a sequence of characters and numbers, the court decided that an average person couldn’t identify the plaintiff by it.

“Solomon is a pretty significant ruling because it takes a little bit less technical approach to what the website ad tech is doing,” said Wolfe. “It’s a good ruling for defendants, and you're going to see people arguing it all over the place and trying to get other courts around the country to apply it.”