Supreme Court to hear Facebook pixel tracking case

The Supreme Court said Monday that it will hear a case stemming from the use of a Facebook tracking pixel to monitor the streaming habits of the user of a sports website. 

The case, Salazar v. Paramount Global, was brought by a man who claims that when Paramount embedded the tracking pixel on the website it violated the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), a federal law enacted in 1988 to protect the videotape rental histories of consumers from being made public. 

That law was passed after a videotape rental store that Judge Robert Bork patronized released his rental history to a newspaper. Bork was in the news at the time because he was embroiled in a series of tough confirmation hearings for his ultimately unsuccessful nomination to the Supreme Court.

The plaintiff in the case, Michael Salazar, argues that Paramount-owned 247Sports.com illegally tracked videos he watched on the website while he was also logged into Facebook. Salazar contends that Paramount Global shared his video-viewing habits with Facebook, which used the information to target advertising.

Salazar appealed to the Supreme Court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit sided with Paramount in July 2023, ruling that Salazar didn’t meet the definition of a consumer under VPPA because he was not a subscriber receiving audiovisual content. The Supreme Court is expected to decide how broadly courts can apply the video privacy law in the digital age.

Salazar asserted that he was a 247Sports.com subscriber since he signed up for its online newsletter, but the lower court ruled that he was merely a subscriber “in the abstract.”