A Texas woman has filed a federal lawsuit against Blockbuster for dissemination of personal information through Facebook’s Beacon ad program.

Cathryn Elaine Harris of Dallas county (also home to Blockbuster Inc.) is claiming the program violates the 1988 Videotape Privacy Protection Act, which was created after the video rentals of US Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork were released to the public.

Beacon revealed Harris’ online video rentals from Blockbuster to her friends on Facebook. This was when Beacon was an opt-out service that was automatically activated and users had to choose not to have the information sent to their friends.

Harris is asking for this to be a class-action lawsuit and demanding at least $2,500 for each supposed infraction of the privacy act.

The bad blood from the Beacon program had largely subsided, but this revelation promises to bring it back to the fore. And it’s quite an interesting lawsuit when one considers that the Videotape Privacy Act could legitimately apply here if the customer was genuinely unaware of the dissemination of their information. Since there was an option to opt-out, Blockbuster may cite that as enough of evidence of good faith to avoid getting dinged on this one. But she may indeed have a case. I know I wouldn’t want my friends knowing I rented “Gigli” eighteen times.

While this lawsuit appears to be frivolous, the law is the law, and Blockbuster’s lawyers are going to have some explaining to do.

Not comment yet from Facebook.

Thanks to Wendy Davis of Mediapost.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 12:19 pmand is filed under Business, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.