Perez Hilton Shared Website Visitors’ Personal Info with Facebook Without Consent, Class Action Claims

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The operator of celebrity news website PerezHilton.com has been hit with a proposed class action that claims visitors’ personal information and video-viewing habits have been shared with Facebook without their consent.

The 21-page case claims defendant Perez Hilton Management, Inc. has violated the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by disclosing to Facebook certain identifying information about its users, along with “a record of every video clip they view.” Per the suit, the VPPA prohibits “video tape service providers” such as Perez Hilton from knowingly disclosing information that “identifies a person as having requested or obtained specific video materials or services” without first obtaining the individual’s consent to do so.

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The lawsuit argues that PerezHilton.com, which reportedly gets “over 300 million hits a month,” has nevertheless collected and shared website visitors’ personal information through a tracking tool known as the Facebook pixel, a piece of code that an advertiser can integrate into their website to gather data about how people interact with the site. The pixel can be customized to track certain “events,” or actions, and the data is then passed on to Facebook, who “processes it, analyzes it, and assimilates it into datasets,” the suit relays. Per the case, Perez Hilton and other advertisers can use the information collected through the Facebook pixel to better target their own advertisements.

The Facebook pixel on PerezHilton.com has been configured to track the URL of each page a person visits and the titles and descriptors of the videos they watch, according to the complaint. Moreover, if a visitor watches a video on PerezHilton.com while logged into Facebook or after recently logging out, the suit explains, the website transmits a cookie to the social media giant containing the person’s Facebook ID, a unique identifier that can be used to locate the user’s corresponding Facebook profile.

The lawsuit claims the data shared by PerezHilton.com with Facebook can, in combination, identify a particular user and the videos they’ve watched. The defendant has nevertheless failed to obtain visitors’ consent in any form before disclosing their personally identifiable information to third parties, the case contends.

The lawsuit looks to represent anyone in the United States who has both a Facebook and PerezHilton.com account and viewed videos on PerezHilton.com.

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