Legal Education Platform Lawline Illegally Shares Subscriber Data With Facebook, Class Action Lawsuit Claims

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A new class action lawsuit claims Lawline has violated a federal privacy law by intentionally disclosing subscribers’ personal information to Meta (formerly Facebook) without consent.

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The 20-page proposed class action lawsuit alleges that FurtherEd, Inc., which does business as Lawline, has run afoul of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by failing to get subscribers’ authorization before sharing their personal data and video-viewing behavior with Facebook via a tracking tool integrated into Lawline.com.

The privacy suit relays that the platform, which offers online legal education courses for attorneys, uses a snippet of programming code called the Meta pixel to capture and send users’ data to the social media giant. Per the case, the pixel automatically transmits the specific title and URL of any videos a subscriber requests or views on the website coupled with the individual’s Facebook ID—a unique string of numbers directly associated with their social media account.

The complaint points out that a Facebook ID “identifies a person more precisely than a name, as numerous persons may share the same name but each person’s Facebook profile (and associated [Facebook ID]) uniquely identifies one and only one person.”

By disclosing this combination of data to Facebook, Lawline thereby provides enough information to link a specific subscriber to their online activity, the complaint contends.

The plaintiff, a Lawline.com subscriber residing in California, says he often watches videos on the platform. By doing so, the consumer’s personally identifiable information was recorded and shared with Facebook without his knowledge or consent, in clear violation of his protected privacy rights, the filing claims.

“The VPPA clearly prohibits what [Lawline] has done,” the case summarizes.

The Lawline privacy suit looks to represent anyone in the United States who, at any time in the past two years, requested or obtained a subscription to Lawline.com or video content from the website as a subscriber while maintaining a Facebook account.

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