The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in Salazar v. Paramount, a case that could gut the Video Privacy Protection Act, the 1988 law Congress passed after a Washington journalist published the video rental history of Judge Robert Bork.
At stake is whether companies can keep selling your viewing habits to Facebook without your consent. According to Slate Magazine, which reported the oral arguments on Wednesday, the court's Republican-appointed justices appeared ready to side with Paramount Global and narrow the law's reach, even though the statute's plain text seems to cover the facts of the case.
How a Sports Newsletter Became a Privacy Case
The story starts with Michael Salazar, a college sports fan who subscribed to 247Sports.com, a Paramount-owned site covering NCAA football and basketball. To register, Salazar signed up for the site's online newsletter in 2022, then used his subscription to watch sports videos.
Embedded in those videos was a Facebook tracking pixel. Every time Salazar watched, Paramount automatically handed Facebook the video's name and URL along with his Facebook ID, the unique identifier the platform assigns to every user. Facebook then used that data to hit Salazar with targeted ads.
This is not a fringe practice. A 2024 study of website privacy found that more than half of all S&P 500 companies use the Meta pixel, sharing users' information with Facebook and Instagram. The New York Times
A Law Born From the Bork Scandal
Congress wrote the VPPA in 1988, after a D.C. journalist obtained and published a list of nearly 150 movies that Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and his family had rented from a local video store, as the The statute bans videotape service providers from knowingly disclosing consumers' personally identifiable information without written consent. It defines a provider as anyone in the business of delivering prerecorded video tapes or similar audiovisual materials, and a consumer as any subscriber of goods or services from that provider. Salazar subscribed to Paramount's site. He requested audiovisual material. Paramount delivered it, then told Facebook what he watched without asking him. In September 2022, he filed a class-action lawsuit under the VPPA. In July 2023, a federal district court dismissed the complaint. The judge reasoned that Salazar was only subscribed to a newsletter, not to audiovisual content, so he was not a consumer under the law. In April 2025, a divided three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that ruling. Salazar then took his case to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments on Wednesday. Slate Magazine reported that the Republican-appointed justices pressed Salazar's lawyer hard, suggesting the statute should be read with limits that the text does not contain, limits that would conveniently shield corporations from liability when they monetize your private data. Justice Clarence Thomas questioned whether goods or services from a videotape service provider would have to be video-related, and said he always thought of 247Sports as a sports site rather than a videotape service provider. Justice Samuel Alito argued the law was based on 1980s technology, when Americans had to go to a Blockbuster store and rent a VHS tape, and asked why smart lower court judges had rejected Salazar's very literal reading of the statute. Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it bluntly. Kavanaugh added that Congress in the 1980s was not thinking about data sharing for targeted advertising. He and Justice Amy Coney Barrett also worried that without a narrow reading, every business in America that has video on its website could face liability, a concern corporate interest groups raised in amicus briefs. Barrett tested the line with an example: if she clicks a video on Nordstrom's website to see how shoes look, that is a profit motive too. Here is the problem with Wednesday's arguments. The VPPA's text covers Salazar's claim. Paramount gave him videos, then disclosed what he watched to Facebook without his consent. That is exactly the injury the statute was written to stop. Technology has changed since 1988. The law's commitment to protecting the privacy of video consumers has not. What has changed, as Slate Magazine noted, is the outlook of the people who now sit on the court. Conservatives spent decades demanding that judges follow the written law, not rewrite it from the bench. That principle was supposed to restrain activist judges, not create a special carve-out for corporations that harvest your data for profit. If the plain text of a federal statute says a company cannot sell your viewing history without written consent, the answer is not to invent an exception because Blockbuster went out of business. There is also a basic fairness question. The VPPA passed with overwhelming bipartisan support because Americans of every political stripe agreed that what you watch is your business. Paramount is not a struggling startup; it is a global media conglomerate that installed Facebook's pixel to make money off its own subscribers. If the court rules for Paramount, it will not be defending free enterprise. It will be defending the right of big companies to spy on their customers without consequence. Congress can always update the statute if it wants to, and it should not need a law to tell companies not to hand your viewing history to Facebook. But until it acts, the VPPA is the law on the books, and the words on the page protect subscribers like Michael Salazar. The Supreme Court has not said when it will rule. A decision is expected by the end of the term, and it will settle how far the 1988 privacy law reaches into the age of streaming, tracking pixels, and targeted advertising. It is a 1988 federal law that bars videotape service providers from knowingly disclosing a consumer's personally identifiable information without written consent. Congress passed it after a journalist published Judge Robert Bork's video rental history during his 1987 Supreme Court confirmation fight. He is a college sports fan who subscribed to Paramount's 247Sports.com in 2022 and sued after learning that a Facebook tracking pixel sent his video viewing history to the platform without his consent. A ruling for Paramount could leave millions of Americans with no legal recourse when websites hand their viewing data to Facebook and other platforms. More than half of S&P 500 companies use the Meta pixel, according to a 2024 privacy study. The court has not announced a decision date. Rulings from the current term are typically issued by late June.Lower Courts Sided With the Corporation
What the Justices Said
We are a textualist Court but usually not a literalist Court.
Text Versus Corporate Convenience
What Happens Next
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Video Privacy Protection Act?
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