Netflix agrees to delete data on ex-customers

U.S. District Court papers filed May 25 revealed greater detail as to how Netflix settled a class-action privacy lawsuit filed against it last year, accusing it of violating the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA).

In short, Netflix agreed not to hold onto data showing which movies its former customers rented for as long as it has in the past. In February, Netflix announced that it had settled the case for $9 million in restitution and attorney’s fees, but didn’t talk about any changes to its policies. But as a plaintiff’s motion filed May 25 seeking preliminary approval of this settlement shows, Netflix agreed to strip out information about the titles its former customers rent from their basic identification profiles no more than one year after they leave the service. The VPPA was signed into law in 1988 by then-President Ronald Reagan after a newspaper outed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s Blockbuster rental history during his Congressional approval hearings. Asubsection of that law requires video operators to destroy rental-history data “as soon as practicable, but no later than one year from the date the information is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was collected.” The plaintiffs contend that, “Netflix’s ongoing maintenance of ‘digital dossiers’ on its subscribers — after canceling their subscriptions and beyond the point where Netflix still needs the information — constitutes a failure to ‘destroy as soon as practicable,’ in violation of the VPPA.”