Can Blockbuster be Sued Over Facebook/Beacon? 102
An anonymous reader writes "A professor at the New York Law School is arguing that Blockbuster violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 when movie choices that Facebook members made on its Web site were made available to other members of the social network via Beacon. The law basically prohibits video rental outfits from disclosing rental choice of their customers to anyone else without specific written consent. Facebook's legal liability in all of this is unclear; with Blockbuster it's a straightforward case of not complying with the VPPA, the law professor says."
Yes, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
So this public information was then used by someone else.
What be wrong with this?
Re:is this (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Privacy is why I dropped Facebook. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I quit facebook. Deleted as much as I could before I left, but I know they still have it.
Facebook is dangerous. Period. Go ahead and be a pirate/ninja warrior... but take a look at who wrote that ap. They get your infomation.
What about Netflix? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yes, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
This was the buzz all this week at a conference on how to make money from internet tracking. Adobe controls the settings on how much information can be written to your local hard drive, and they sell the ability to anyone willing to pay. There is a global setting that users can turn to "off", but Adobe ignores it if they are given enough money. Since Flash tends to be installed system-wide and on all browsers on a machine, it doesn't matter if you clear out browser cookies or try blocking tracking sites. If a partner site sticks a 1x1 pixel flash bug on their site, it has the ability to read tracking info from any other site, and to write back additional information.
Beacon is clever because it creates a large enough "cookie" that many sites can write into the cookie without changing the size taken on disk. Beacon also defines exactly how to parse the information, and how to write new info without changing the total cookie size.
Of course, I was just watching a canned demo of this, so the company claiming to be behind Beacon could be making it all up, but the sales pitch was pretty convincing. I haven't the time or inclination to verify this, as I don't ever look at face book, and generally don't allow flash on my machines (which leaves the web looking very poorly these days)
the AC
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)