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In 2022, college sports fan Michael Salazar became a digital subscriber to 247Sports.com, a website that shares news about NCAA football and basketball. In order to register for the website, owned by Paramount Global, Salazar signed up for 247Sports’ online newsletter. And he used his subscription to view sports-related video media. Quietly embedded within those videos, though, was a tracking pixel created by Facebook.

Because Paramount installed Facebook’s tracking pixel on the 247Sports website, every time Salazar requested or viewed a video, Paramount automatically disclosed the name and URL of the video to Facebook, along with Salazar’s Facebook ID, the unique identifier Facebook assigns to all of its users. Facebook then used that information to show Salazar targeted advertisements.

Privacy violations like this have become a routine part of life on the internet. According to a 2024 study on website privacy, more than half of all companies listed in the S&P 500 index use the “Meta pixel” on their sites, sharing people’s information with both Facebook and Instagram. But in theory, there are at least some legal boundaries.

Back in 1988, after a D.C. journalist obtained and published a list of movies rented by Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, a scandalized Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act. To be clear: Congress was scandalized by the nonconsensual disclosure of........

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