Wall Street Journal Privacy Lawsuit Alleges Website Subscribers’ Personal Data Secretly Shared with Facebook

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A proposed class action claims Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Company, Inc. secretly shares WSJ.com subscribers’ personal data with Meta Platforms (Facebook) without consent.

If you’re a Wall Street Journal subscriber who’s watched videos on WSJ.com and has a Facebook account, let us know here.

According to the 17-page lawsuit, the media company has directly violated the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which prohibits a “video tape service provider” from disclosing information about a consumer’s video-viewing behavior without prior consent. The suit alleges that the company has “knowingly” transmitted to the social media giant WSJ.com subscribers’ unique Facebook IDs and the names and URLs of any videos they watched or requested while on the site.

The case contends that the website utilizes a piece of back-end code called a Meta pixel to track and transmit user data and activity back to the social media company, “even if the Facebook application is running in the background of the consumer’s computer.” Per the complaint, the tracking tool embedded in WSJ.com can be used to intercept and report on a subscriber’s every movement on the website, including the pages they visit, the content they view, the buttons they click and more.

In addition, by disclosing a user’s Facebook ID—an identifier uniquely linked to an individual Facebook account—the defendant provides the social media company with all it needs to link a specific subscriber to their video-viewing preferences, the filing shares.

The lawsuit charges that Dow Jones & Company did not inform consumers that it was tracking and transmitting their personal information to Facebook, nor did the publisher obtain their express consent before doing so.

As the suit tells it, the defendant’s allegedly unlawful practices have invaded consumers’ privacy and breached their VPPA-protected privacy rights.

The lawsuit looks to represent anyone in the United States who was a registered user or subscriber of any website, mobile app or video-on-demand service operated by Dow Jones & Company, who viewed prerecorded video content on the platform and whose personal information was disclosed to Facebook via the Meta pixel.

If you’re a Wall Street Journal subscriber who’s watched videos on WSJ.com and has a Facebook account, let us know here.