VHS-Era Privacy Law Still Causing Headaches For Streaming Video 62
jfruh (300774) writes "The Video Privacy Protection Act, a 1988 law that made it illegal for a video store to share your rental history, has thrown up roadblocks for modern-day streaming video sites. Last year Congress amended the law to make it possible for you to share your Netflix viewing history with your social media friends, as long as you opt in. But what does "opting in" entail? Hulu is now on the receiving end of a lawsuit over the fact that clicking the Facebook "like" button on a viewing page shares that viewing activity on Facebook."
Not causing headaches, preventing companies from a (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not a case of an outdated law holding a company from doing a good thing. This is a case of a law being accuratly applied to prevent companies from sharing personal information without any reasonable expectation of assent.
I mean come on, can anyone say with a straight face that standing in a punlic forumn and saying outloud that you pizza gives pizza hut permission to share your purchase and order history?
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Nah, spelling errors would get him a +3 max.
Grammar error - take it down a notch more.
This is a tough crowd.
Re:Not causing headaches, preventing companies fro (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that in this case it's more accurately "going to a pizza parlor, finding out that they have a little flag in the pepperoni pizza portion of the menu that you can stick on your lawn that says 'I like peperoni pizza', putting that flag on your lawn, and then suing the pizza company for having the lawn flag available."
Though in reality, r'ing tfa hints that it may hinge more on the fact that the inclusion of a like button on the page at all automatically shares with Facebook the fact that you were even on the page due to referrer information. The 'Like' button itself is not Hulu sharing the data with Facebook, that's the clicker sharing the data with Facebook.
Re: Not causing headaches, preventing companies fr (Score:1)
The law requires informed consent. Nothing in any of the described methods even comes close to that. And i did assume this was similar to how facebook uses the like flag on their own site to qualify as consent to share data. If i miss that it was just having the facebook code block on the page then that just make the egregious violation even worse.
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Re:Not causing headaches, preventing companies fro (Score:5, Insightful)
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http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=otherpolicies&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=13084
These rules were formulated in the 1950s in response to McCarthy era hysteria on "subversive" communist/socialist books. At that time certain governmental agencies were
Re:Not causing headaches, preventing companies fro (Score:5, Insightful)
Terrorists have replaced communists. The laws you mention are old. One change enacted by the Patriot act was to track library check outs.
And this:
From fox news [foxnews.com]
The wholesale tracking of all books is suspicious. What business does the govt have knowing who read the latest Dr. Seuss books? The patriot act should have allowed tracking only those books related to terrorism -- weapon making books, books about extreme violence, etc.
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Documents like the DoI and books written by like-minded people could give people ideas that could be dangerous to our government.
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Remember the American Library Association response to that part of the Patriot Act? They strongly recommended that libraries not keep such records. Librarians know who has currently checked out a particular book, and they destroy that information once it's returned.
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No...this is a case of a blatantly frivolous lawsuit. Because clicking the like button is A) A voluntary action by the user B) Clicking the like button is basically opting in, and C) The user can remove the post
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Fubared priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
So our video viewing preferences are rigidly protected by big government but if we want to peaceably assemble to demonstrate and protest we must be confined to a chain-link fenced "free speech zone" in a parking lot somewhere in an out of the way industrial zone.
More like some Congressman doesn't want his wife to find out about all the midget porn.
Re:Fubared priorities (Score:5, Informative)
So our video viewing preferences are rigidly protected by big government but if we want to peaceably assemble to demonstrate and protest we must be confined to a chain-link fenced "free speech zone" in a parking lot somewhere in an out of the way industrial zone.
More like some Congressman doesn't want his wife to find out about all the midget porn.
Sort of. This is the "Bork Act" so named because when Robert Bork was nominated to SCOTUS his video rental habits were made public; no doubt causing concern amongst our illustrious members of Congress and Senators that theirs would appear in the next attack when they ran for reelection. hence, the concern for protecting our privacy trumpeted the ability of companies to profit off of it.
Re:Fubared priorities (Score:4, Funny)
I always thought it had something to do with the Swedish Chef.
I wonder what his viewing history would be like.
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Yep, and for the same reason websites can't publish your buying history of music to anybody but you... I have a lot of "teenage" music in my collection that I purchased while I was a teenager... get that?
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On those "free speech zones" -- if there is such a security problem that some people must be isolated, then _everyone_ must be isolated. No "friendlies" on the parade route, "antis" elsewhere -- that is a 14th Amendment violation (Equal Protection) which becomes effectively a 1st Amendment violation by reducing the reach of some speech.
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That's a pretty retarded argument since the "like" button is clearly associated with Facebook and is implemented with cross-site scripting so you're really giving that data directly to Facebook yourself. What else is clicking it supposed to do?
Re:Fubared priorities (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue here isn't the stupidity of the users, but the article written by an uninformed author and an equally misleading /. summary.
The real issue is that whenever a page includes a Facebook like button, it has to reference the requisite Javascript files that are hosted on Facebook servers. So whenever you load a Hulu video page, your browser pings Facebook with information about which Hulu page you are visiting simply to render the button. It doesn't matter whether or not you click the like button: Facebook knows which Hulu page you watched either way. And since Facebook keeps track of this information even when you are logged out of your account [telegraph.co.uk], there is definitely no opt-in on the part of the user. IMHO, this lawsuit is completely justified.
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That sort of tracking is done with ALL cross-site scripting. The only solution is to deactivate cross-site scripts through plugins like Ghostery or Noscript. Singling out Hulu for doing what every other user tracking operation is doing is silly.
Re:Fubared priorities (Score:5, Informative)
TFA: "During debate over his nomination, Bork's video rental history was leaked to the press. His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Writer Michael Dolan, who obtained a copy of the hand-written list of rentals, wrote about it for the Washington City Paper. Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that Bork himself had stated that Americans only had such privacy rights as afforded them by direct legislation. The incident led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act."
I used to think the real moral of the story was that if we want to have privacy, we have to demonstrate that the same technologies that violate our privacy can also have negative political consequences for them.
Consider this: In 1988, the fact that a Supreme Court Justice Nominee's completely boring video rental list -- and what it implied for the political futures of Congressmen and Senators whose video rental history was, shall we say, not so boring -- absolutely terrified politicians, because politicians could actually lose their seats over scandals.
Today, when we find out that an anti-gay politician is toe-tapping in a bathroom stall or sexting his underage Congressional pages or is otherwise compromised, we shrug it off and laugh for a day, then vote some other hypocrite into office, but such scandals are no longer national news.
The only thing that would do it would be a data dump of everything NSA has on sitting Congresspersons. And now I realize that things that would be hit those selectors are probably the only things pre-emptively excluded from the database, because the existance of such records are the only thing that could shut the programme down.
The real surprise of 1988 was that the Bork controversy happened so fast that they passed a law that protected everyone, not just themselves. They haven't made that mistake since.
This is a problem ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I, for one, dislike my history being sold to other merchants. Even if it means I pay more for a service, privacy has value. I slways opt-out, but this sort of marketing is deeply invasive and subject to NSA-esque abuse in targetted cases.
One can only imagine this kind of world now (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine a world where privacy is the default setting. Truly mind blowing.
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There is default privacy, which I like, and then there is clicking facebook's like and then complaining that doing so shared that you viewed a movie...
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On the other hand, social networks are where you go to specifically share info, so the onus is on you to decide what needs to be private. Facebook, Google+, Digg, Reddit, etc. allow for integration so you can share info from other sites on your social network of choice. Why take an active step to share info and then complain when that info is made public? It's moronic at best. I hope Hulu countersues and wins.
I disagree with the article's author (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I disagree with the article's author (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, this shows why we still need the now-amended VPPA.
The blog author is wrong on this one. The original GigaOm article [gigaom.com] the blog author was commenting on was much more factual.
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You talk as if it is a bad thing.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Um. (Score:2)
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Is it actually about the act of clicking, or the fact that typically the Like button is included by means of a javascript snippet which allows Facebook to see you visited that page without any interaction with the button.
Of course, if thats the case, then video services using Google Analytics, ad networks etc are all on the same hook.
But then all of these things require the users browser to download the thing that is giving the information away...
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No. Originally the Netflix' intent of a "like" button was that they could assess the sort of movies you like and provide better recommendations.
Like == sharing is a new concept in world of video rentals. I absolutely positively do not want the likes and positive reviews I've written on my account at Neflix or Imdb to be associated with the real me, used to catalog me and sold to possibly hostile third parties.
The original article sounds like an industry shill trying to spin a good, useful law as something t
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A Facebook "like" button is different than a local-to-the-site "like" button. It only works if you have a FB account, and uses the clearly recognizable FB logo. Anyone who uses FB recognizes the button, and expects it to work the same on all sorts of different sites.
The apparent problem here (according to what I've heard) is that the FB "like" button on Hulu didn't just share your like of the movie with your FB friends; it shared your entire viewing history! If that's actually true, then I definitely have t
Really? (Score:3)
> Hulu is now on the receiving end of a lawsuit over the fact that clicking the Facebook "like" button on a viewing page shares that viewing activity on Facebook."
Um, that's exactly what the "Like" button is for. I hope Hulu countersues over this stupidity and wins.
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More accurately, replace 'clicking the Facebook "like" button' with 'having the Facebook "like" button'.
The javascript that displays the "like" button is on Facebook's servers, i.e. Facebook gets told which pages you visit on Hulu and could log that to assemble your Hulu browsing history. Do you trust Facebook not to do that?
For that matter, if I was an unscrupulous Three Letter Agency, I'd encourage "like" buttons everywhere and ensure I had a way to access Facebook's traffic. Who needs to tap the entire i
What kind of idiot? (Score:2)
What kind of idiot thinks clicking the Facebook like button DOESN'T tell your friends you liked something?
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What kind of idiot thinks clicking the Facebook like button DOESN'T tell your friends you liked something?
It's not a matter of being an 'idiot' to believe that there is a difference between sharing that you liked a single, particular film, and having one's entire viewing history available for public view. It is entirely reasonable to assume that there are two separate actions required to share the different sets of data.
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That's because TFS is the usual slashdot idiocy, and TFA is simply bad reporting. This report [gigaom.com] tells quite a different story:
"As Judge Beeler explains, companies can choose not only whether to include the Like button in the first place, but also to specify what information the button should relay to Facebook through cookies. In the case of Hulu, the presence of the button conveyed not only basic browser information, but also details about the user’s “watch page” — a personal page that every Hulu user has."
...and...
"The judge noted that the information transfer was not restricted to occasions when a Hulu user “Liked” a video, but rather every time a user watched a video."
So yeah, I'd say it sounds like a lot more than I'd expect was being shared.
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A Good Law (Score:1)
That's a good law. We need more of those.
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Far more general data protection laws are commonplace. The USA is unusal in not having such laws.
How does Hulu manage in Canada? Or Netflix in Canada and the EU?
Strange stance on Slashdot (Score:1)
I guess when the repeated "government doesn't understand technology" and "privacy protections are being eroded" stances collide on Slashdot, the former wins? This is a rare instances where the consumer is being protected. And it isn't hobbling streaming video one bit. It is only hobbling Hulu's ability to trick consumers into having their viewing history exposed to third parties in unexpected ways.
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I agree that this is one of those rare instances where the consumer is being protected. But lets not fool ourselves, this law is not there to protect consumers as much as its there to protect the ruling elite from having their tastes in pornography becoming public knowledge.
Pfft... (Score:2)
That's why I'm using my Beta to stream movies...
The're not sharing video rental history (Score:2)
There is no link between clicking a like button and having actually rented it, unless they've restricted like buttons to customers who have rented the movie.
Click a like button is:
a) Not Hulu sharing anything, it's Facebook doing the sharing. and
b) Not your rental history anyway.