The online video provider was cleared of all charges

Apr 3, 2015 07:43 GMT  ·  By

Hulu, the American video streaming service, has won the 2011 lawsuit in which several people accused it of sharing their information with a third party, which just happened to be Facebook.

At the time, people tried to file a class lawsuit, but their request was rejected. According to The Recorder, the judge has ruled the charges that the plaintiffs have brought forward, and the company was cleared.

It seems that the plaintiffs had accused the company of having broken a law stating that a video tape service provider cannot disclose any “personally identifiable information concerning any consumer.”

Furthermore, the company had shared this kind of information with Facebook, by providing them a cookie known as “c_user” and also some URLs of “watch pages” so that Facebook would know where to send the code associated with the Like button.

The court decided that the plaintiff' privacy had not been violated

However, the judge declared that there was no way for users to be identified using the data provided to Facebook. What’s more, Facebook had never used the “c-user” cookies that Hulu had sent in any way.

The judged declared the following in respect to her decision: “Let us say that a video-store clerk gives a local reporter a slip of paper showing only someone‘s name. Weeks later, someone else hands the reporter a list of video titles. There is no obvious connection between the two.”

This was an accurate way of describing the case, but the plaintiffs do not plan to stop here and their attorney has already announced that they would appeal. According to the law mentioned above, if they do win the appeal, they could get about $2,500 from Hulu for having used their personal information without their consent.

Even if Facebook never made use of the data received from Hulu, the latter has still violated the terms of the agreement with its customers, by sharing viewing history with another company. It is only natural for the plaintiffs to feel betrayed and to request monetary compensation.