Lawsuit Claims Vice Discloses Personal User Information to Facebook Without Consent

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Vice Media LLC has been hit with a proposed class action over its alleged disclosure of website visitors’ personal information to Meta Platforms (Facebook) without their knowledge or consent.

The 19-page lawsuit claims that a tracking tool called the Meta pixel on vice.com secretly collects information about users—including their Facebook ID and the titles of videos they’ve watched on the website—and transmits that data to Meta, who uses it for targeted advertising purposes.

According to the suit, Vice’s surreptitious collection and disclosure of users’ personally identifiable information violates the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which requires “video tape service providers” such as Vice to obtain a consumer’s consent in a standalone form before sharing information that identifies specific video materials they’ve watched or requested.

The case claims that no vice.com user has provided the company with the level of consent required by the VPPA to authorize the disclosure of their identities and video viewing information to Meta.

The Meta pixel is a piece of programming code installed on websites such as vice.com that gathers information about users—in this case, the titles of videos they’ve watched and their Facebook ID, the suit explains. A person’s Facebook ID, the lawsuit relays, is linked to their Facebook profile and allows Meta, or “any other ordinary person” for that matter, to locate a specific vice.com user’s profile, where other information, such as their name, personal interests, work history, relationship status and other details, can be found. 

“Simply put, with only a [Facebook ID] and the video content name and URL—all of which Defendant knowingly provides to Facebook without appropriate consent from the digital subscribers—any ordinary person could learn the identity of the digital subscriber and the specific video or media content they requested on Defendant’s website,” the complaint contends.

According to the case, Vice Media profits from this collection of personal information in that the company can better target ads to users. Meta, for its part, benefits through Vice’s use of the tracking pixel because the defendant has a greater incentive to advertise through Facebook and other Meta-owned social media platforms, and Meta can use the provided information to build more detailed profiles of its users, the suit states.

The lawsuit contends that vice.com users do not consent to the sharing of their personal information as required by the VPPA and have had their privacy rights violated.

The suit proposes to cover anyone in the U.S. who requested and viewed video content on Vice’s website and were Facebook or Instagram users during the time Meta’s pixel was active on Vice’s website and whose personally identifiable information and viewing content was disclosed to the social media giant through the pixel.

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