Colorado man sues UNL, Huskers.com manager, alleging sharing of subscriber data

Tim Peterson brought the case in U.S. District Court in Omaha against UNL, the Athletic Department, Learfield Communications LLC and Sidearm Sports seeking class-action status on behalf of all subscribers of Huskers.com.

Learfield is a collegiate sports marketing company based in Plano, Texas. And Sidearm Sports, bought by Learfield in 2014, manages college sports websites and mobile platforms across the country.

The lawsuit may be one of the first of its kind in Nebraska. But it appears to be part of a national trend that took off last fall.

According to Bloomberg Law, dozens of companies — from the NFL to NPR — were sued last year in a wave of privacy class-action lawsuits for allegedly sharing tracking data on what videos they watch.

In the complaint, Peterson’s attorneys said that when Peterson subscribed to the Nebraska Cornhuskers’ newsletters at Huskers.com, he wasn’t asked to give consent to share his personal identifying information (PII) or told it would be captured by the Facebook Pixel they use — HTML code used to track and gather data about website visitors — and be transferred to Facebook, “exposing the subscribers’ PII to any person of ordinary technical skill who received that data.”

Attorney Mark Reich, of Levi & Korsinsky LLP in New York City, said the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) prohibits video tape service providers from sharing personal information tied to what they’re watching (a title, description or subject matter) without their consent.

“Defendants knew that their Pixel resulted in users’ PII and Video Watching Data being shared (resulting in VPPA violations), and that they failed to obtain users’ consent to allow their Pixel to operate in a way that shares users’ protected information with Facebook,” he alleged in the complaint.

Reich said each time subscribers watched a video on the website and had their information shared is a separate violation of the act.

In addition to seeking upward of $5 million ($2,500 per subscriber), the lawsuit also asks a judge to enter an injunction requiring the defendants to immediately remove Pixel from the website or to obtain consent from subscribers.

Reich said Peterson watched three or four videos a month since he signed up in 2016, including Nebraska Football press conferences about Coach Scott Frost’s firing last year and the introduction of new head coach Matt Rhule.

Last month, Peterson served UNL with notice of the violations he’s alleging and said he would continue using the site if the tracking tools were removed or rendered inactive.

Yet they continued to share subscribers’ information in violation of the act, Reich said.

He said Learfield and Sidearm use tracking tools, including so-called pixels, Meta Pixel and Sidearm’s own, to track user activity on team websites, including Huskers.com, and to track which webpages a user visits, which sports users are interested in and which videos they are watching.

That’s despite the Video Privacy Protection Act limiting video service providers’ ability to share consumers’ personal identifying information with third parties, except where consumers provide “informed, written consent,” Reich said.

Attorneys for UNL haven’t yet responded to the lawsuit in court, and a spokeswoman didn’t immediately provide comment when reached Tuesday.