There is a certain rhythm to the recent wave of Video Privacy Protection Act litigation. Plaintiffs point to pixels. Defendants point to statutory text. Courts are increasingly asking a simple question that ends up doing all the work. What exactly was disclosed?
A new decision out of the District of Delaware gives a clear answer. In Benson v. SimpleNursing, LLC, 2026 WL 1045614 , the court granted a motion to dismiss with prejudice, rejecting a VPPA claim built on familiar pixel-based allegations.
The setup is one we have seen before. SimpleNursing sells subscriptions to access prerecorded nursing exam videos. Its site uses Meta and TikTok pixels that allegedly transmit user information when a subscription is purchased. The plaintiff claimed that this disclosure of data tied to video access violated the VPPA.
The defense moved to dismiss. The court agreed.
The opinion is interesting not just because of the result, but because of where the court draws the line.
Start with the threshold issue. The defendant argued that it was not a “video tape service provider,” suggesting that the VPPA should be limited to entertainment content. The court rejected that argument. Reading the statute as written, it held that prerecorded online videos, even for educational purposes, qualify as “similar audio visual materials.”
So far, so plaintiff-friendly.
But that is where the runway ends.
The case turns on the second element. Whether the defendant disclosed “personally identifiable information.”
The VPPA does not protect all personal data. It protects information that identifies a person as having requested or obtained specific video materials. That word, “specific,” does real work.
The plaintiff alleged that her subscription purchase triggered the transmission of identifiers like her phone number and device data. What she did not allege was that any particular video was disclosed. No title. No URL. No allegation tying her identity to a specific piece of content.
That gap proved fatal.
Relying on cases like In re Nickelodeon Consumer Privacy Litigation, the court emphasized that VPPA liability requires disclosure of information that reveals a user’s actual video-watching behavior. A subscription shows access. It does not show what was watched.
The court makes the point in practical terms. If a subscription alone were enough, a company could face liability even if the user never watched a single video. That is not what the statute is designed to capture.
The line is clean. Access to a library is not the same as identifying what someone took off the shelf.
The remedy underscores the point. The court dismissed the claim with prejudice. This was not treated as a pleading defect that could be fixed with more detail. The theory itself fails where it cannot connect a user to a specific video.
For companies facing VPPA claims built on pixel tracking, the takeaway is becoming harder to ignore. The question is no longer just whether data was shared. It is whether what was shared actually reveals what a user watched.
If it does not, this decision suggests the case may not get past the pleadings stage.
CIPAWorld 