MLB.tv Subscribers’ Personal Data Secretly Given to Facebook, Class Action Says [DISMISSED]

The proposed class action lawsuit detailed on this page was dismissed by the court on January 7, 2026, along with two other cases accusing the streaming service of illegally sharing viewer data with Meta.

According to an 18-page report and recommendation from by U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein, the plaintiffs were unable to support their claims of embedded back-end tracking tools with reasonable evidence. More broadly, Judge Gorenstein stipulated that the agreement at hand between the Major League Baseball and Meta to operate tracking pixels on MLB.tv did not constitute a violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act.

Judge Gorenstein’s report centers on a ruling in Solomon v. Flipps Media, Inc. (Case No. 23-7597), a suit that accused Flipps Media’s digital streaming service, FITE, of Meta pixel data sharing that the Supreme Court in December 2025 declined to take up on appeal. Solomon, the judge wrote, held that the definition of personally identifiable information under the VPPA includes information that would allow an ordinary person to identify a consumer’s video-viewing habits, but not data that only a sophisticated technology company could use to do so.

In effect, the data collected by the Meta pixel is unlikely to be understood by an ordinary person to be the title of a video someone watched, Judge Gorenstein relayed.

In the wake of Solomon v. Flipps Media, Inc., the report says, courts in the Southern District of New York have “uniformly” dismissed VPPA lawsuits premised on a company’s use of a Meta pixel.

The judge found that one plaintiff’s argument against dismissal was “unpersuasive,” given that consumer’s claims were “weaker for being less detailed than the complaints in Solomon” and post-Solomon VPPA cases.

The complaints at issue must also be dismissed, Judge Gorenstein continued, because, “regardless of the absence of exemplar screenshot of specific allegations regarding how [personally identifiable information was disclosed,” the lawsuits lacked any details about how any ordinary person would use a Facebook ID to identify the plaintiffs.

Judge Gregory H. Woods, the United States District Judge residing over the MLB.tv case, confirmed in his order that Judge Gorenstein’s analysis was “thoughtful and well-reasoned.”

The MLB.tv lawsuit has been dismissed with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled.

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