Court decisions shaping privacy law: dispositive rulings, circuit splits, arbitration fights and emerging theories of liability.
Much of US privacy law is settled in litigation rather than legislation, which makes circuit splits the leading indicator of where exposure is heading. This hub covers the decisions that move the law.
Decided 25 June 2021 by five votes to four, TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez took a jury verdict that had already been returned and removed three quarters of the class from federal court. This post reads the case as a case: the OFAC Name Screen product, the six-day trial, the arithmetic of the award, the reasoning on each of the three claims, and the two dissents.
Read more →One phrase in the Video Privacy Protection Act — "goods or services from a video tape service provider" — has produced an open split among three courts of appeals over who may sue. The Supreme Court granted review on 26 January 2026 and has set argument for 14 October 2026. This post sets out what each opinion actually reasoned.
Read more →Two 2023 decisions of the Illinois Supreme Court set the outer bounds of exposure under the Biometric Information Privacy Act, and the legislature answered one of them in 2024. The reasoning in each is more revealing than the result: both courts reached conclusions the statutory text compelled while acknowledging the consequences.
Read more →Plaintiffs suing over analytics pixels, session recording and web chat rarely plead a privacy statute. They plead eavesdropping laws written for telephone wires in 1967 and 1968, which carry per-violation damages and no requirement to prove loss. This guide sets out the statutory elements those claims turn on, the party-consent question that decides most of them, and the newer pen-register theory.
Read more →The Video Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1988 after a newspaper published a Supreme Court nominee's video rental history. It now generates a steady stream of claims against websites that embed video and third-party tracking pixels. Two questions divide the courts: who counts as a subscriber, and what qualifies as personally identifiable information.
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