Yourbump.com Visitors’ Personal Data Secretly Handed to Facebook, Class Action Claims

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A proposed class action alleges that Spine Media LLC, operator of parenting website Yourbump.com, secretly transmits website visitors’ personal data to Facebook without consent.

According to the 14-page lawsuit, the defendant has run afoul of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which prohibits “video tape service providers” from disclosing certain information about consumers’ video viewing habits without written consent. The case claims that the plaintiff, a California resident, discovered in December 2022 that his personally identifiable information (PII), such as his Facebook ID and the titles of videos he watched on Yourbump.com, had been “surreptitiously” reported to the social networking company.

The complaint charges that by reporting visitors’ “event data”—i.e. their activities and movements on Yourbump.com—as well as personal identifiers, the defendant “did exactly what the VPPA prohibits: they disclosed [consumers’] video viewing habits to a third party.”

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The lawsuit alleges that Yourbump.com, a website that creates and hosts videos, currently uses four “Facebook tracking pixels” to collect and report user activity and information back to Facebook. Per the case, Facebook tracking pixels are a coded tool that advertisers can embed into their websites to trace user interactions and collect personal data.

“When the Facebook Tracking Pixel captures an action, it sends a record to Facebook …,” the filing says. “Advertisers control what actions—or, as Facebook calls it, ‘events’—the Facebook Tracking Pixel will collect, including the website’s metadata, along with what pages a visitor views.”

By utilizing Facebook tracking pixels, Yourbump.com purportedly collects visitors’ “event data”—that is, the titles, descriptions, and URLs of videos they viewed—as well as their Facebook IDs, the complaint explains. According to the filing, Facebook IDs can be used to identify users’ Facebook profiles and access all the public information appearing on their personal pages. By sharing visitors’ Facebook IDs, the defendant thereby provides enough information to link a specific individual to their video viewing behavior, the case contends.

The lawsuit charges that the actions of Spine Media and its alleged use of Facebook tracking pixels on Yourbump.com are “illegal, offensive, and contrary to visitor expectations.”

“Visitors would be offended to know that Defendants secretly disclose to Facebook all of key [sic] data regarding a visitors’ [sic] viewing habits,” the case reads.

The lawsuit looks to represent anyone in the United States who viewed video content on a website operated by Spine Media, and whose personal information was disclosed to Facebook without consent.

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