The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on Wednesday in a case determining whether a 1988 video privacy law applies to modern internet tracking. The case, Salazar v. Paramount Global, centers on whether a person who subscribes to a free digital newsletter qualifies as a "consumer" under the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), a law originally enacted to protect the privacy of physical video rental records.
Congress passed the VPPA in response to the 1987 disclosure of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental history by a journalist. The statute prohibits "video tape service providers" from knowingly disclosing "personally identifiable information" about a consumer’s viewing habits without consent. Plaintiff Michael Salazar filed a class-action lawsuit after 247Sports.com, a site owned by Paramount Global, allegedly used a Meta Pixel tracking tool to share his Facebook ID and video-viewing history with Facebook while he was a newsletter subscriber.
Lower courts have disagreed on the law's reach in the digital era. A U.S. District Judge in Tennessee dismissed Salazar’s case, ruling he was not a "consumer" because he subscribed to a newsletter rather than audio-visual content. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld that dismissal in a 2-1 decision in April 2025, with the majority stating that the term "goods or services" in the law is limited to those that make a business a video provider. The dissenting judge argued the court was adding limitations not found in the statute's plain text.
The financial scale of the case is significant due to the VPPA’s specific penalty structure. The law allows for statutory damages of up to $2,500 per violation, plus punitive damages and attorney’s fees. For a large-scale website with thousands or millions of subscribers, these per-person penalties could result in what Paramount Global described in court filings as "ruinous class-action liability." The outcome will establish a national standard for how tracking pixels, which are currently used across the internet for targeted advertising, are regulated under decades-old privacy frameworks.
The decision will also set a precedent for how the judiciary interprets aging statutes in the face of rapid technological change. A ruling for Salazar would signal that 20th-century privacy laws can be expanded to cover modern data-sharing tools, while a ruling for Paramount would leave such regulations to future legislative action. A final decision from the Supreme Court is expected by the end of the current term in June 2026. Prior to this, other federal appellate courts have reached varying conclusions on whether shared computer code even qualifies as "personally identifiable information," highlighting the lack of a uniform legal standard.