PC Gamer Lawsuit Investigation: Attorneys Look into Possible Privacy Violations
Last Updated on January 5, 2024
Investigation Complete
Attorneys working with ClassAction.org have finished their investigation into this matter.
Check back for any potential updates and take a look at our open investigations here. The information on this page is for reference only.
At A Glance
- This Alert Affects:
- Facebook users who have a digital subscription to PC Gamer or signed up to receive the magazine’s online newsletter and watched videos on PCGamer.com within the past three years.
- What’s Going On?
- Attorneys working with ClassAction.org have reason to believe that PCGamer.com may be using a tracking tool to secretly transmit details about certain users and the videos they’ve watched to Facebook. They’re now looking into whether a class action lawsuit can be filed on behalf of digital subscribers and newsletter recipients over potential privacy violations.
- How Could a Lawsuit Help?
- A class action lawsuit, if filed and successful, could help compensate people whose privacy may been violated and force PC Gamer to change its data privacy practices.
Attorneys working with ClassAction.org are investigating whether a class action lawsuit can be filed on behalf of PC Gamer digital subscribers and newsletter recipients over potential privacy violations.
Specifically, they believe that PCGamer.com may be using a tracking tool to transmit details about these individuals and the videos they’ve watched to Facebook without their permission. This data may tie a user’s watch history to their Facebook ID, a unique identifier that can be used to match the individual to their Facebook profile.
Attorneys suspect that PC Gamer may have violated the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by sharing consumers’ private information without their informed, written consent.
How Could PC Gamer Be Sharing Data with Facebook?
Many website operators gather data about the people who visit their websites by using an invisible tracking tool called the Meta (formerly known as Facebook) pixel.
The pixel, which can be embedded on any webpage, can be programmed to record every action a visitor takes, such as the buttons they click, the searches they perform and the content they view.
In the case of PCGamer.com, attorneys are specifically looking into whether the website is tracking which videos its users have watched and sending that information to Meta along with each person’s Facebook ID. A Facebook ID is a unique identifier linked to an individual’s Facebook profile and could potentially be used to match up a specific person with the videos they’ve watched on PC Gamer’s website.
In general, the data collected by a website through the Meta pixel can be used by both the website operator and the social media giant to better target advertisements to their users.
It’s believed that PC Gamer’s suspected data sharing practices may violate the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, which prohibits “video tape service providers” from disclosing any information that identifies the video materials a person has requested or watched to third parties without their consent.
How Could a Lawsuit Help?
If filed and successful, a class action lawsuit could help PC Gamer subscribers and newsletter recipients get back money for potential privacy violations.
While there are no guarantees, the federal Video Privacy Protection Act states that consumers who had their rights violated under the law could be owed $2,500.
A lawsuit also has the potential to force the digital magazine to change its data privacy practices.
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