[opendtv] Watch Out! New Video Law Lets Netflix Share What You're Viewing
- From: Monty Solomon <monty@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: undisclosed-recipient:;
- Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2013 23:08:53 -0500
Watch Out! New Video Law Lets Netflix Share What You're Viewing
Adam Popescu
January 4, 2013
It passed the House, the Senate, and just before the new year, the
President signed it into law. In a significant shift in video privacy
- online video rental companies can now share information about the
movies you rent or buy. As you might expect, things are about to get
more social.
According to the new law, companies have to ask only once. You can
opt out, but if you don't, say goodbye to the rights to your video
data for two full years. As per the change, Netflix will introduce
new social features that basically link users' Netflix and Facebook
accounts and share their viewing history with friends. Netflix was
previously unable to do this in the U.S. by the 25-year-old Video
Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which banned the sharing of personal
data for anything but law enforcement purposes (even now, Hulu
remains in court for previously sharing viewers' info).
On the surface, sharing viewing history may not seem like a big deal,
but the law undermines the privacy of Internet users, and takes away
user control over significant amounts of potentially sensitive
personal data.
Looking back, it's ironic this new law even passed, as the VPPA was
originally enacted in the 1980s in response to a local Washington
newspaper publishing a list of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's
rented videotapes during his nomination process. At that time,
Congress was up in arms over this privacy breach, which helped
scuttle Bork's appointment and led to the phrase "borked" entering
the language. But less than a month after Bork's passing on December
19, 2012, it seems that Netflix investment of roughly half a million
dollars in lobbying Congress to update the law was enough to do the
trick.
...
http://readwrite.com/2013/01/04/watch-out-new-video-law-lets-netflix-share-what-youre-viewing
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