Woman Sues Blockbuster For Telling All Her Facebook Friends What She Was Renting

By April 17, 2008

Facebook’s Beacon has finally resulted in a lawsuit. A Texas woman has sued Blockbuster for participating in Beacon, claiming that “Blockbuster violated the federal Videotape Privacy Protection Act by sharing information about her movie rentals and sales with Facebook without first obtaining her written consent,” says MediaPost.

She’s seeking class action status, with $2,500 for each violation of the statute. MediaPost says the law was passed in 1988 when a newspaper obtained the rental history of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.

What about you? Did Facebook tell all your friends that you rented Basic Instinct 2… again?

Blockbuster Sued For Participating In Facebook Beacon [MediaPost]

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Comments

  1. lesbiansayswhat says:
    April 19, 2008 at 4:32 am

    @aphexbr: That is where the actual complaints come from. No one signed up for something and then turned around and complained about it. You didn’t have to do anything for your purchases to be published as a Facebook notification to everyone linked to you. I don’t know how it worked but some companies knew you had a Facebook profile (maybe an automatic search based on your email?) and had a direct connection to it to create a newsfeed. In the very early stages it didn’t notify me it would be posting things to my profile. I found out when I happened to look at my own profile later. It’s just unnecessary and disrespectful..even for a social networking site.

  2. aphexbr says:
    April 19, 2008 at 5:11 pm

    @lesbiansayswhat: Aha. OK, that makes sense now. I’d also guess it’s the email address that’s being used to match the accounts and it is definitely a shady tactic.

  3. kshahbaz28 says:
    April 21, 2008 at 9:13 pm

    I don’t think it was linked to an email address. My boyfriend and I have a blockbuster account, registered to his personal email (not mine), and one day I was adding movies to our cue from my work computer, and the rental history posted to MY facebook account–not his. I loathe what facebook has become.

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