College Team Sites Targeted in Data Privacy Lawsuits
A group of recently filed federal lawsuits seek potentially tens of millions of dollars in damages for plaintiffs who claim their personal data was improperly captured and disclosed by their favorite college teams’ websites.
So far the suits, which are seeking class-action status, have targeted the official sites of four Division I programs—Florida, Nebraska, Texas and Southern California. The other defendants named in the cases are Learfield and its subsidiary Sidearm Sports, which manages those sites, along with hundreds of others for collegiate athletic departments.
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At issue is whether the defendants have properly disclosed or provided an opportunity for users to consent to various tracking tools, including those engineered by Meta and Google, which share personal identification information with third parties—and if this violates federal and state privacy laws.
For example, the lawsuits allege the websites violated the Video Privacy Protection Act by capturing the information of individuals who clicked on embedded videos on the team sites with Facebook’s tracking code, Pixel.
The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which was signed into law in 1988, amended the federal criminal code to prohibit video stores from disclosing information about the movies their customers rented. The legislation spawned from a reporter obtaining the rental history of failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork from a local Washington, D.C., video store.
In recent years, a wave of lawsuits have attempted to make VPPA claims against websites that run Facebook Pixel, a JavaScript code snippet that allows sites to track visitor activity. The litigation trend has included class actions against the NFL, MLB, NBA, BetMGM and ESPN+.
The VPPA statute allows successful plaintiffs to recover as much as $2,500 in liquidated damages.
As with those other lawsuits, grievances over Pixel anchor the four college team website cases filed since March, each of which is being handled by the consumer and securities law firm, Levi & Korsinsky. The firm, which did not respond to requests for comment, is also representing a putative class of plaintiffs who sued the NFL over alleged VPPA violations last fall.
In their pleadings, the plaintiffs’ lawyers say they’ve identified, through their “investigatory work,” at least 173 Sidearm Sports collegiate sites whose use of Pixel “resulted in subscribers’ Facebook ID numbers and video watching histories being shared with Facebook,” signaling new proceedings against other schools could be coming down the pike.
Last month, Texas and Florida filed motions to dismiss themselves from the lawsuits, asserting sovereign immunity defenses. Learfield and Sidearm have also filed motions to dismiss in those cases, contending that, as government contractors, the immunity should extend to them as well. The Learfield parties buttressed their defense by arguing that any user information that would be conveyed to a third-party would not “readily permit an ordinary person” from determining who was watching certain videos–the benchmark established by a 2016 appellate court ruling.
A Learfield spokesperson, in a statement to Sportico, said that neither it nor Sidearm falls within the VPPA statute because neither companies are video tape service providers.
Earlier this year, a federal judge dismissed a VPPA lawsuit against Scripps Network, filed by a class of consumers who had subscribed to an HGTV.com newsletter.
Nevertheless, the latest lawsuits appear to have at least prompted Sidearm to update its online service agreements.
On April 11, three weeks after the first case was filed against UF, the terms of service page was changed to include a lengthy dispute resolution clause requiring users to waive their rights to class action litigation or jury trials. That language did not appear on the site prior that date, according to a review of past versions of the page captured by the Internet Archive.
The most recent college team suit, which names USC as a defendant, claims that in addition to the Trojans’ website violating VPPA, its search bar is discretely powered by Google’s Programmable Search Engine, which, unbeknownst to users, enables Google to obtain their search terms that it then shares with “countless third parties.” USC, unlike the other school defendants, is a private institution, and therefore cannot assert sovereign immunity.
“The university takes data privacy very seriously and will defend itself against these allegations,” a USC spokesperson told Sportico in a statement.
Spokespeople for Texas and Florida declined to comment, while a representative from Nebraska said that the school intended to “vigorously” defend itself against the lawsuit filed against it.
In 2018, Sidearm settled an unrelated discrimination lawsuit filed by a legally blind Florida Gators fan, who alleged that the UF athletic website failed to accommodate the needs of the visually impaired.
As for Learfield, which acquired Sidearm in 2014, the litigation serves as just another headache for a company already dealing with significant financial challenges relating to its college athletics portfolio.
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