Patreon: Blocking platforms from sharing user video data is unconstitutional
arstechnica.comSounds like Patreon are using knowledge of their members' subscriptions to then sell this 'viewing data' to third parties. Patreon aren't even first-party to which videos are 'watched', they're just a middle-man for payments from end-user to provider.
It doesn't feel like a huge stretch beyond all the other personal data point selling gross-ness going on between big-tech and advertising, but it makes it feel as if there's nowhere to hide from this scraping of layers off one's digital soul.
And it could hurt the providers of content. I'm not paying for anything if all the parties in the payment chain are attempting to extract more value from me (my data) than I'm attempting to pay to a provider. Sorry provider, there are no safe avenues.
> The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) blocks businesses from sharing data with third parties on customers' video purchases and rentals. At a minimum, the VPPA requires written consent each time a business wants to share this sensitive video data—including the title, description, and, in most cases, the subject matter.
This might be a bit off-topic, but does this mean also that what Plex did when it started sending out "Here's what your friends watched this week" emails would also be a violation?
Plex isn't for purchases or rentals, it's for streaming users' privately owned content, so seems like it wouldn't come under this.
I guess at the end of the day the world's legal system needs to decide if when visiting a website do all requests need to stay on the website itself, or if that website is allowed to use any third party sites to run its business as well. That is the crux of what is going on here, not selling viewing history even though that might be leaked.
The facebook pixel[1][2] that is the center of the legal battles here is routinely used not to sell information to facebook persay, but to allow the website to retarget the website visitor at a later point via an advertisement. For example you visit pateron's website, you might get an ad on facebook later from Patreon.
Now, can (and does) facebook do more with the data that goes along with it, maybe, but that is what the facebook pixel is routinely used for.. not something sinister, at least by the company who implemented it on their website.
By only reading the linked article and knowing about the Facebook pixel in general it really feels like Patreon is being forced to challenge this law not because they think its bad, but more because they are being forced to because they are being sued. Things are a lot more nuanced. Should they have just pled guilty though? Absolutely not.
Personally I think the law should be upheld but the lawsuit against Patreon dismissed.
This was just the push I needed to delete my account. Now to find alternative paths to support the folks I like.
Same. This is a bad look for them, and a full attack against a major privacy law
…and done. You have to go to the privacy center and “make a privacy request” and it takes 14 days
> You have to go to the privacy center and “make a privacy request” and it takes 14 days
Yet another reason to leave them. Removing the ability to close the account from inside patreon and instead needing to allow an additional third-party to access my account is very user-hostile.
Their legal argumentation is extremely weak. That said, if they do end up having to pay $2500 per violation they'll probably go bankrupt...
What if they did some out-of-the-box thinking and stopped loading 3rd party ad scripts on their site?
> But Patreon engineer Jason Byttow has said that complying with the VPPA's consent requirement imposes "unnecessary burdens" on Patreon by requiring "substantial engineering work" to build a new consent regime that would ultimately "degrade the user experience."
Our privacy is inconvenient for them.
Additionally, isn't the "Patreon user experience" merely "pay money to selected provider".
I'm admittedly mostly unfamiliar, but how is the user experience degraded? Are they attempting to classify not-as-targetted advertising as a degradation of user experience? If so, they'll never be speaking for me.
There are quite a few laws that are inconvenient to quite a few businesses, but usually those businesses know to say the quiet part quietly.
They're saying that asking whether they can share the fact that you watched a given video with Facebook would degrade your user experience. Sounds like the idea of simply not sharing that information with them hasn't occurred to them.
If we didn't have all these criminal statutes, quite a few more business models could flourish.
It's job security for him. Keeping bridges safe and flying rockets also requires substantial engineering work. I fail to see why the fact that work would need to be done should affect the outcome in any way. Zero reason to make their life convenient in any way.
A recent Australian Prime Minister did claim legislative power to alter mathematics.
Poor quality sound, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g
Not sure why you're trying to push that. :(
It was a smart arse response to a smart arse question.
> It was a smart arse response to a smart arse question.
Haven't come across that justification before.
If it was a smart arse question, I'd be guessing it was justified in the face of attempts at the Australian government at the time attempting to further their already advanced designs toward creating a surveillance state.
For the sake of clarification, I'm pointing it out as an example of denial-based justification of a virtually untenable position, in two contexts:
One: If the leader of a country would say something like that in public then, hey, make the request to repeal a privacy law, who knows, there may be enough greased palms for this to slide through. Not that I want to give them any ideas.
Two: the person to whom I was replying mentioned engineering challenges of bridge building and rocket science which could be made easier with some legislation that reduces the complexity of maths and physics (if Malcolm is to be believed) - for the sake of humour.
Like Indiana's legislation regarding the value of pi?
> Haven't come across that justification before.
You haven't really looked at all then. Go find the video that shows the question as well, rather than the one you have that just shows an out-of-context response.
That'll make it clear.
It has nothing at all to do with anything you're pushing in the rest of your response.
When a reporter asked Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, “Won’t the laws of mathematics trump the laws of Australia?,” Mr. Turnbull reportedly responded “Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”
Excerpt from: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/no-the-laws-of-australia-...
And .. the context that followed that you omitted:
I'm no fan of Turnball for many many reasons .. but he was not an idiot about technology and well understood mathematics (for someone not in the field professionally).what we are seeking to do is to secure their assistance. They have to face up to their responsibility. They can’t just wash their hands of it and say it’s got nothing to do with them," Turnbull said when asked how the encryption should be broken.As stated above by another commentator he made a smart arse response to a smart arse question, as is intuitively obvious to the meanest intellect, and then clarified that legal steps would be taken to ensure to cooperation of the major invested actors.
He doesn't say that.
He chooses to relate to Australian law, not maths. It's his job to do that. He is not a mathematician.
It is frustrating watching Muricans balk at a change of topic, by saying that he claims something he didn't.
Anglo culture and American culture really are two different beasts.
Not quite seeing the distinction you're trying to make:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-laws-of-australia-will-tru...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/turnbull-war-on-maths
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/malcolm-turnbull-prime-mi...
https://gizmodo.com.au/2017/07/prime-minister-says-the-laws-...
https://itwire.com/government-tech-news/government-tech-poli...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/australian-pm-calls-en...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/07/14/malcolm-tu...
Good enough for Diffie, good enough for me.
It’s funny how nobody there complained about all the engineering work required in order to track and share their users’ data.
Wait, how is targeted advertising on YouTube compliant?
That's what I'm wondering. This is regarded as one of the strongest privacy laws in the US and yet I all but entirely forgot it existed as I don't recall any cases against big tech with this law in the last 5 years.
but apparently it only protects 'subscribers' in a financial sense:
>In a continuing effort to limit consumer's privacy violations, Malley filed a class action involving Hulu in 2012. A San Francisco federal trial court found the VPPA's subscriber protections apply to users with Hulu accounts.[10] In 2015, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit found that those protections do not reach the users of a free Android app, even when the app assigns each user a unique identification number and shares user behavior with a third-party data analytics company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act#C...
I think this is about sharing the viewing history with other peopl, whereas targetted advertising is you giving YT an ad, asking them to show it to people who watch X/Y/Z, and trusting they are doing that with your ad.
YouTube isn’t sharing your data with a third party to enable that targeting. They have all your data themselves.
Targeted advertising is handled by Google's ad platform. Loading YT loads Google's ad scripts. This is actually a good argument for why YT and Google Ads should not be under the same roof.
Patreon is sending data to Meta by loading the Meta marketing pixel on their site when you're logged in to Patreon.com.
Is this move intended to justify Patreon taking a bigger cut, so that they can justify the cost of our privacy? They could do that and still siphon off much less than YouTube would.
Alternately, can this be seen as a chink in their armor and a way for someone(s) new to compete in their market?
Honestly it's probably not some kind of grand scheme. My guess is that whatever engineers or product managers decided to add the Meta Pixel in the first place had never heard of the Video Privacy Protection Act, and either didn't consult their attorneys, or their attorneys hadn't heard of it either, and now the damage is done: they're being sued, and if they lose, they owe a huge amount of money, even if they were to decide today to stop using Meta Pixel from now on, so now their attorneys are throwing whatever they can at the wall to see what sticks.
I doubt the revenue they earn from this is worth the bad PR, so I don't think it's about that, I think it's about avoiding paying damages, which could be $2,500 _per view_ if they were all disclosed to Meta -- potentially billions of dollars. It might well bankrupt the company.
> Alternately, can this be seen as a chink in their armor and a way for someone(s) new to compete in their market?
The last couple of years in tech tells me there is no "market" that doesn't involve not shuttling your data to the worst companies in the world.
Sounds like they are trying to assist in blackmailing people.
CALL TO ACTION
Go to your Patreon account, for any active memberships click 'Send Message'. Send something along these lines:
Hello, apologies for the disruption but I'm wondering if you would consider reaching out to your Patreon representative and voicing your feelings on their recent corporate behaviour, which I'm sure you'll find disagreeable
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/patreon-attacks-...
If it's possible to continue supporting you on another platform I would much prefer to do that.
Thanks as ever for your work.
Respectfully I don’t think that is very productive. I’m not a fan of this lawsuit or patreon’s behavior either, but I think Patreon has to fight this in some way or risk going bankrupt.
If this really is an existential threat to the company they aren’t going to listen no matter how many creators talk to them about it. I think what patreon needs is some solution where they admit using the tracking pixel on those pages was bad (and stop) without giving bankrupt.
No doubt they'll sell us all out to survive, but we needn't be supportive of that.
If the creators you support are unaware of this, which is likely, this will encourage them to diversify their patronage-system. In some highly-improbable universe this will cause Patreon to go bust before they get a chance to affect the law which is still a win for the rest of us.
This is contemptible. I use patreon to support artists and creators. I know those people don't care about my viewing history. Patreon is now the parasitic middleman and should be burned off accordingly.