Posted by Matthew Cassidy.
In 1988 the Video Privacy Protection Act was passed by Congress to prevent private information about tape rentals or sales records from being released to the public. The case involves a man named Mark Ellis who downloaded the Cartoon Network Application on his Android smartphone in order to watch shows on that network.
The app is able to track viewer history and an Android phone I.D.; it then sends the information to an analytics company named Bango. Bango is a very advanced organization that can not only monitor customer behavior, but also link user’s information about the user through the Android I.D.
Cartoon Network’s third party partner, Bango, violated the Video Privacy Protection App by gathering personal identification from the Android user’s I.D. The court weighed its opinions on another case called Re Hulu Privacy Legislation that involved the Privacy Protection Act. This case helped Cartoon Network by providing the true definition of a subscriber to just visiting a website. Therefore, Ellis was not “committed” to the application, so therefore the Privacy Protection Act did not apply to him.
Matthew is a finance major at the Stillman School of Business, Seton Hall University, Class of 2019.