Watch out! New law lets video companies share what you're viewing

Excerpts from Readwrite.com, link to full article below: 

"In a significant shift in video privacy - online video rental companies can now share information about the movies you rent or buy. As you might expect, things are about to get more social.

According to the new law, companies have to ask only once. You can opt out, but if you don't, say goodbye to the rights to your video data for two full years. As per the change, Netflix will introduce new social features that basically link users' [for example] Netflix and Facebook accounts and share their viewing history with friends. Netflix was previously unable to do this in the U.S. by the 25-year-old Video Privacy Protection Act(VPPA), which banned the sharing of personal data for anything but law enforcement purposes (even now, Hulu remains in court for previously sharing viewers' info). 

On the surface, sharing viewing history may not seem like a big deal, but the law undermines the privacy of Internet users, and takes away user control over significant amounts of potentially sensitive personal data. 

Looking back, it's ironic this new law even passed, as the VPPA was originally enacted in the 1980s in response to a local Washington newspaper publishing a list of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's rented videotapes during his nomination process. At that time, Congress was up in arms over this privacy breach, which helped scuttle Bork's appointment and led to the phrase "borked" entering the language. But less than a month after Bork's passing on December 19, 2012, it seems that Netflix investment of roughly half a million dollars in lobbying Congress to update the law was enough to do the trick."

"Marc Rotenberg, the executive director and president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), testified in Congress against the bill, citing his organization's interest in "supporting the rights of Internet users to control the disclosure of their data held by private companies."

"The debate over online privacy and Netflix does not exist in a vacuum," Rotenberg stated at the hearing. "It is becoming increasingly clear that only privacy laws actually safeguard the privacy rights of Internet users."

"Jules Polonetsky, the director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, said the the real issue is that people don't know they're sharing. When that sharing is done without user consent and system settings are unclear, it's bad for the public. "This is about the sharing of your records of video rental history, as opposed to on a clear, permission basis, enabling people to key-in sharing mode," he said. "Sharing should be in a clear opt-in basis." ... "That accidental sharing is a major problem, Polonetsky warned. "I saw a rabbi I know sharing a fairly raunchy video about girls on bikes, falling off bikes... a conservative, corporate lawyer sharing a somewhat offensive video, none of them clearly understanding that by clicking on some filthy link shared by their friends, to see what the attraction was, they'd be letting hundreds of their friends know and sullying their reputation."  

Rainey Reitman, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's activism director agreed. She said the move is bad for the public because unclear sharing undermines the "strong legal protections put in place to protect video watchers... A major concern is that individuals will enable the function and not realize that it is continuing to broadcast their video watching habits to social networks - for years."

[And, of course, companies will be gathering and selling our viewing data, etc.]