Case Study
Video Privacy Protection Act Litigation Spurs Complex Advertising Tracking Analysis for High-Profile Entertainment Company
Dozens of lawsuits have been filed in recent years alleging that advertising analytics trackers and website pixels used to collect information to support digital marketing violate data privacy protections under existing U.S. regulations. When a global entertainment company became subject to class action litigation arguing violations of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), FTI Technology’s adtech privacy experts delivered a highly complex, technical scoping, collection and analysis exercise to inform the case.
Situation
In most common applications, advertising trackers are embedded into the backend of websites to track, and send to third parties, a wide range of information, which may include personally identifiable information. Litigators and regulatory agencies are increasingly pursuing action against companies for misuse of these trackers and for personal data protection violations that can result. In this matter, the VPPA, which can apply to any website containing video content, was leveraged to pursue class action litigation against an entertainment company for use of trackers that recorded the type of content individual users were viewing on its site.
The dataset in scope for this case was large, with more than 5 million rows of data to analyze, and complicated, consisting of data from 10 unique digital advertising trackers. Each tracker had a unique format for how and where the data was stored, requiring detailed analysis, knowledge of where to look and technical understanding to unravel the data and reveal the extent of personal information that had been captured and shared.
All observations about the use of the ad trackers on the site and the workflows followed during analysis needed to be documented and defensible so they could stand up to intense scrutiny in court.
Our Role
Experts within FTI Technology’s Information Governance, Privacy & Security practice have supported clients on dozens of remediations, litigations and high-profile Federal Trade Commission actions dealing with the use of advertising tracking. The team has firsthand experience deploying, developing and analyzing a wide range of pixel and ad tracking tools and is familiar with their technical nuances. Having worked on some of the first-ever adtech enforcement cases, FTI Technology has developed a highly technical database of ad trackers and their data elements, data formats, naming conventions, storage locations and other important metadata. The database has been mapped to additional information about third-party entities and how they process and use the data that is collected. This resource enables the team to quickly, accurately and defensibly support clients in analyzing their ad tracking activity and potential exposures.
Equipped with this knowledge and experience from previous technical work on similar cases, the team provided the following solutions to the client:
- Defined the scope of domains, sites, mobile platforms, living room devices, gaming consoles and trackers that would need to be analyzed for the case. This included performing mock user journeys and scenarios through the sites, while tracking all backend information being captured from the site and transferred to servers during those actions.
- Implementation of FTI Technology’s proprietary platform to quickly collect the data from the scoping exercise, categorize the data elements transmitted and document the entities receiving data.
- Close analysis of two streaming platforms hosting live and on-demand content, to capture the data emanating from the site, the specific trackers in use and the nature of trackers in use that were purpose-built for video streaming analytics.
- Technical evaluation of novel, highly complex streaming analytics data to enable prescriptive reporting on the extent of data tracking taking place on the client’s sites.
- Development of detailed dashboards and expert reports to inform counsel and equip them for case proceedings.
Our Impact
Within one week, FTI Technology’s experts onboarded to the matter, conducted data collection, analyzed the findings, and delivered a detailed and defensible expert report about the ad tracking activity on the client’s sites.
The team’s rapid response and unmatched technical knowledge helped reduce complexity in a high-stakes litigation and provided counsel with the insights needed to move forward with an informed defense.