What Is VPPA?

The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) is a US federal law, originally passed in 1988 in response to video rental disclosures, that restricts sharing a person's video-viewing history with third parties without consent. It has recently been applied in lawsuits against websites that share video-viewing data with tags like the Meta Pixel.

Like CIPA (California Invasion of Privacy Act), the VPPA is old legislation applied to new technology: any site with embedded video that also runs a Meta Pixel or similar tag risks sharing ‘what a specific visitor watched’ with a third party in a way the VPPA was written to prevent, even though the law long predates pixels or embedded video players. Media, entertainment, and education sites are disproportionately exposed here.