The Philadelphia Inquirer has agreed to pay more than a million dollars to settle claims it sold information on its subscribers’ video viewing habits to Facebook and its parent company, Meta, without the subscribers’ knowledge or permission.
The Inquirer will pay $1,125,000, with about $400,000 going to lawyers who filed the class-action lawsuit, according to an email sent to the subscribers. The Inquirer denies any wrongdoing.
To receive a payment, people who had digital subscriptions between October 1, 2019 and January 16, 2024 must file a claim at the settlement website. The deadline to make a claim, ask to be excluded, or object to the agreement is October 27.
The settlement documents do not say how much each claimant will receive. The size of class action settlement payments typically depends on how many people make claims. About 180,000 people who had subscriptions and Facebook accounts during the covered period are eligible to apply, per a legal filing with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
The Inquirer, a for-profit company owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, reportedly has about 90,000 digital subscribers.
Payments in large class-action suits can vary widely, from pennies per person to $30 or more, and in some cases much more if the plaintiffs suffered substantial harm.
A similar case against the Boston Globe resulted in a $5 million settlement last year, which included payouts of $22 to $44 per subscriber and subscription extensions worth $1 million.
A slew of similar lawsuits
The lawsuit against the Inquirer is one of many in recent years targeting news publishers and other companies over website software code and the sharing of video viewing histories with Facebook.
In January, the owners of the Tampa Bay Times settled a similar case for $950,000. In March, a federal judge ruled that another such lawsuit against Block Communications, which owns the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Toledo Blade, could proceed.
Suits have been filed against NASCAR, Chick-fil-A, the National Football League and General Mills, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
In the Inky case, two subscribers separately sued in October 2022 and their lawsuits were consolidated. They allege that when people bought digital subscriptions and started using them, the news organization installed Meta Pixel on their computers.
Meta Pixel is “an invisible tool…that tracks users’ actions on Facebook advertisers’ websites,” such as the Inquirer website, “and reports the actions to Meta,” the court filing says. The subscribers’ lawsuit defines pixels as small sections of a website’s software code that measure user’s actions. Meta Pixel also uses “cookies,” bits of data that many websites store on computers and other devices.
When subscribers clicked on a video at the Inquirer.com website, the tool sent Meta/Facebook the name of the video, its URL or web address, and the subscriber’s Facebook ID, they say. Facebook assigns each of its users an ID.
That process let Meta know who was watching which videos and enabled the Inquirer, Meta, and Meta’s advertisers to directly target advertising to the subscribers, the plaintiffs say. They allege the Inquirer received “a financial benefit” — advertising payments from Meta — for installing Meta Pixel on subscribers’ computers.
Inquirer argues it broke no laws
The people who initially sued are Jason Braun of Lafayette Hill and Stephanie Carter of Philadelphia. As in the other similar cases, they and their attorneys argue the Inquirer violated the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, which bars disclosure of a customer’s video rental or sale records without proper written consent.
They also argue that the company violated the Pennsylvania Wiretap and Electronic Surveillance Control Act, which prohibits the interception, disclosure, or use of a person’s wire, electronic, or oral communications.
In response, the Inquirer “denied that it shared any video watching information of its users and denies it violated the VPPA or the PA Wiretap Act,” the court filing says. An Inquirer spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
Lawyers for the paper had argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed because digital “cookies” don’t constitute personally-identifying information under federal law; disclosing a web page someone visited is not the same as disclosing which videos they viewed; and a Facebook ID and website address are not protected communication.
They also argued the subscribers had consented to sharing their personal information by agreeing to the Inquirer’s privacy policy, by accepting Facebook cookies, and “through their use of the internet.” Braun and Carter also didn’t allege any “cognizable injury” from the purported sharing of their video viewing history, the lawyers wrote.
The settlement website notes that the settlement approval process “may take time” and there may be appeals before payments are sent out. A final approval hearing is scheduled for March 26, 2025.
Editor’s note: Billy Penn and WHYY News have received grant funding from the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
