Nicole Pileggi v. Washington Newspaper Publishing Company, LLC

The Video Privacy Protection Act (“VPPA”) prohibits a “ video tape ser vice provider” from “know ingly disclos[ing], to any person, personally identifiable information concerning any consumer of such provider.” 18 U.S.C. § 2710(b)(1). The statute unambiguously defines “consumer” to include a “subscriber of goods or services from a video tape service provider.” Id. § 2710(a)(1). The courts below assumed Washington Newspaper was a “ video tape ser vice provider.” Ms. Pilegg i subscribed to a newsletter from Washington Newspaper, which subsequently disclosed her video-watching history to Facebook. Yet both lower courts dismissed Ms. Pileggi’s VPPA claim. They did so because, in their view, she did not subscribe to an audiovisual good or service from Washington Newspaper and, thus, was not a statutory “consumer.” The question here—which this Court has already agreed to answer in Salazar v. Paramount Global, No. 25-459—is whether the phrase “goods or services from a video tape service provider,” as used in the VPPA’s definition of “consumer,” refers to all of a video tape service provider’s goods or services or only to its audiovisual goods or services.