William McGeveran, Privacy and Playlists

William McGeveran, Privacy and Playlists

Comment by: Felix Wu

PLSC 2012

Workshop draft abstract:

Social media is not a passing fad. In response to enthusiastic user demand, companies from Amazon to the Washington Post have built “sharing” functionality into their operations, especially online. A boomlet in platforms for socially shared entertainment further underscores the trend – increasingly, we are reading, listening to music, and watching movies among our friends. For example, the popular new music streaming service Spotify, now highly integrated with Facebook, encourages users to notify their online friends of their listening choices and to post playlists for others to use.

This sudden dramatic shift challenges traditional privacy law. Many existing rules assume a data collector who redistributes personally identifiable information to third-party recipients unknown to the data subject, for use in profiling. Spotify (or Facebook or the Washington Post Social Reader) sends information to a user’s friends, not strangers, and does so as a means of creating word of mouth, not of profiling. As I have argued previously, genuine recommendations from one’s friends are immensely valuable, but illegitimate ones can both invade privacy and undermine overall information quality.

This paper considers the appropriate model for regulating privacy in socially shared reading, listening, and viewing. As a case study, it examines recent legislation passed by the House of Representatives and pending in the Senate to amend the Video Privacy Protection Act. Proponents of the legislation argue that it merely modernizes the statute for the social media age. Opponents believe it vitiates one of the only federal laws to directly protect intellectual privacy with an opt-in consent rule.

I conclude that both camps are wrong. The VPPA could and should be updated, but the current bill does not go about it in the right way. More broadly, many of the issues raised in this debate over video apply equally to books, music, web browsing, video gaming, and other pursuits. The paper will make recommendations for appropriate means to address privacy in the social media age.