During a closed-door meeting on K Street last week with several executives whose job titles contain the word monetization, I realized something profound about the American consumer. We have become fundamentally selfish with our data. We sit in our living rooms, consuming thousands of hours of premium digital content, and we stubbornly refuse to let the platforms that provide this bounty extract every possible cent of value from our psychological profiles. It is a staggering display of entitlement, and thankfully, the highest court in the land is finally in a position to put a stop to it.
The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 applies to the modern digital age of streaming videos, email newsletters, and targeted advertisements. For the uninitiated, the VPPA is a legislative relic. It was hastily passed after a journalist obtained and published the VHS rental history of conservative Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Congress panicked, deciding that a man’s decision to rent a John Wayne picture was a sacrosanct secret.
But let us be completely honest with ourselves about the year 1988. Back then, renting a video required putting on pants, driving to a physical brick-and-mortar store, and handing a plastic cassette to a teenager. Privacy made sense when the transaction was analog. Today, we stream high-definition television through invisible airwaves directly into devices we take into the bathroom. The transaction is digital, and the currency is our behavior. To demand privacy in this ecosystem is to demand a free lunch from a corporate entity that has graciously spent billions of dollars to build the restaurant.
The only victims of this archaic privacy law are the hardworking algorithms desperately trying to pair a user's depression-binge of baking shows with a targeted ad for heavily medicated weight-loss injections.
The plaintiffs in the current wave of VPPA lawsuits are whining that media companies are secretly embedding tracking pixels into email newsletters and video players, quietly sending their viewing habits and Facebook IDs to third-party data brokers without their explicit consent. They claim this is a violation of their rights. I claim it is the absolute pinnacle of American efficiency.
Why should a platform have to ask my permission to send my data to a holding company in Delaware? If I spend six consecutive hours watching a documentary series about a polygamist doomsday cult, I fully expect my social media feeds to instantly populate with advertisements for off-grid compound real estate and bulk ammunition. I do not want to be asked if I want these ads. I want the invisible hand of the market to anticipate my spiritual deterioration and monetize it seamlessly.
The people demanding strict adherence to the 1988 law simply do not understand the sheer economic devastation that would occur if we stopped feeding the advertising beast. We are talking about a multi-billion-dollar ecosystem of data brokers, ad networks, and behavioral analysts whose entire livelihoods depend on knowing exactly which episode of a 1990s sitcom you paused to go cry in the kitchen. To cut off their supply of granular human vulnerability would be catastrophic to the gross domestic product.
If the Founders had wanted us to watch eight consecutive hours of reality television without our retinas being scraped and sold to a geopolitical adversary, they would have explicitly put it in the Bill of Rights.
Furthermore, the optics of the privacy movement are incredibly hypocritical. The base wants to enjoy the fruits of a hyper-connected, artificially intelligent digital utopia, but they balk at paying the completely reasonable toll of living under total corporate surveillance. You cannot have your cake, eat it too, and then sue the bakery for telling a health insurance conglomerate how much cake you just ate.
When we force streaming services and digital publishers to hide our viewing habits, we are actively stifling innovation. We are blinding the very companies that are trying to optimize our existence. A tracking pixel is not a spy, it is a digital concierge. It is a tiny piece of code working tirelessly in the background of your email app to ensure that your viewing of a mundane corporate training video is properly leveraged to sell you a moderately priced sedan.
The sheer emotional toll this uncertainty has taken on the data brokering community is entirely absent from the mainstream media's coverage of the Supreme Court docket. These are professionals who just want to do their jobs, and they are being hamstrung by a law written when the fax machine was considered cutting-edge.
We are flying completely blind out here. Just last week, due to compliance fears, we accidentally served a luxury life insurance ad to a teenager watching a video game stream, instead of the middle-aged man who had just watched four consecutive documentaries about Everest disasters. It is inhumane.
I, for one, have nothing to hide. I proudly invite Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and whatever digital newsletter I accidentally subscribed to in 2017 to take a long, hard look at my viewing history. Package it. Bundle it with the viewing histories of my neighbors. Sell it at auction to a consortium of pharmaceutical companies and political action committees. Let them parse my late-night viewing of historical war epics and determine exactly which brand of tactical flashlight I am most susceptible to purchasing at retail price.
The Supreme Court has a profound opportunity to drag consumer law into the twenty-first century by simply acknowledging that the consumer no longer has any rights worth protecting. The videotape era of 'Be Kind, Rewind' is dead and buried. We have entered the era of 'Be Quiet, Submit,' and frankly, the user experience has never been better.