Newton resident Oliver Ciric is suing Al Jazeera, the media company headquartered in Qatar, for violating his and others’ American privacy rights.

Ciric, a filmmaker and Newton South grad, argues that Al Jazeera has violated the Video Privacy Protection Act by sharing personal information of its users with third parties. This is a class action lawsuit, meaning that if successful it would apply not only to Ciric but also to other viewers of Al Jazeera’s video content.

This suit was filed April 15.

The Video Privacy Protection Act, passed in 1988, says that video tape service providers may not provide information about their customers to third parties without the customer’s informed consent. It was passed after Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video tape rental history was disclosed to a newspaper. The precise ways in which this Act applies to consumers in the digital age is complicated. In 2010, Facebook was found to have violated the Act by sharing information about individuals’ purchasing history on other websites to Facebook without their consent. However, in Ellis v. Cartoon Network, Inc. (2015), the Eleventh Circuit said that people who watched videos without making accounts did not count as subscribers for the purposes of VPPA protections.

Al Jazeera produces pre-recorded videos in a variety of genres, such as news, documentaries and TV shows, and these are available on its website, as well as mobile apps.

While an account is not needed to watch this content, the lawsuit notes that Al Jazeera encourages viewers to create accounts by saying that it will enrich their watching experience by allowing viewers to create personalized video feeds and receive notifications about videos of their interest.

When Ciric watched a video while logged into his account, Al Jazeera provided information about the video he watched to Google.

“Defendant enables Google, through its cookies, to pair Website users’ Google Account ID and video-viewing information, for users who are signed into their Google account,” says the lawsuit. Al Jazeera also provided information to Amplitude, a digital analytics software company. This is despite the fact that Al Jazeera says it would not do this. “Defendant discloses all this information to Amplitude even if users click “Ask App Not to Track” and “Reject all” when they sign up for an account,” says the suit.

The reason Al Jazeera does this, argues Ciric, is so that they can market and advertise to viewers of their video content. He quotes from the Amplitude website, which says: “Amplitude is an event-based analytics tool that tracks the behaviors of users based on in-product interactions and analyzes user behavior in real-time. Event-based analytics is the method of tracking and analyzing interactions between users and your product, also known as events.”

Ciric did not consent to his video watching data being shared with a third party, and Al Jazeera did not give him the option to opt out, and instead continued to collect data even when a user asked not to be tracked. While it is impossible to know precisely how many other Massachusetts residents have Al Jazeera accounts, the popularity of the platform would suggest that it is a large number, and these residents have also had their privacy violated. Because of the large number of people who have potentially been affected, Ciric filed a class action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. “[T]he Court has specific personal jurisdiction over Defendant because Defendant obtained valuable personal data about Massachusetts consumers for its own commercial gain,” reads the suit.

When the VPPA was passed, Senator Pat Leahy (D-VT) wrote that “In an era of interactive television cables, the growth of computer checking and check-out counters, of security systems and telephones, all lodged together in computers, it would be relatively easy at some point to give a profile of a person and tell what they buy in a store, what kind of food they like, what sort of television programs they watch, who are some of the people they telephone. I think that is wrong.”

But the courts can’t know what laws are being broken without someone telling them about it, and in this instance, that someone is from Newton. Whether or not they will agree that Al Jazeera giving user data to Google falls under the purview of the VPPA remains to be seen.