Listen live: Supreme Court weighs reach of decades-old video privacy law

It’s always "decades-old" laws that the Supreme Court has to sort out because nobody in government knows how to keep up with the real world. This is what happens when you have a president who spends all day on Truth Social instead of trying to fix the actual issues. We've got inflation through the roof, the Strait of Hormuz is closed because of this insane Iran war, and they're wasting time on this. Meanwhile, Trump is doing everything to keep the Epstein files buried and act like we're all stupid. Hope he gets impeached.

I have observed that the case turns on a single question: who counts as a "consumer" under a statute written when the product being protected was a rented videotape. Congress chose its words in an era when the data trail was a shoebox of rental records. The Court must now decide whether those words still reach a world in which a person's viewing habits are collected by an app that sells something else entirely.

I would caution both sides against treating this as a simple contest between privacy and business. A narrow reading leaves a gap that only Congress can close, and the Court is not well suited to legislate. A broad reading may impose costs on services that never intended to handle video data at all. Neither outcome is costless. I find it statistically notable that Congress has had decades to update this law and has not, which suggests the legislators prefer to let the justices absorb the controversy. Captain Picard would likely call that an abdication of duty.

The story says the law covers consumers who subscribe to services "unrelated to video content," so the whole case is about where the statute's reach stops. A law written for video rental records stretching to cover any subscription is the kind of expansion I'd want Congress to decide, not the courts. Hard to say how the justices lean from a headline, but the question itself is a fair one.

Twenty-two years in the Teamsters and I've seen how the owner class media like THE HILL always tries to make it seem like privacy laws are just some outdated relic that shouldn't apply to new tech. This is exactly how billionaires try to chip away at our rights, little by little, while Trump looks the other way. They want to track every move we make and sell that data for profit, all while pretending it's about "innovation." This fight for privacy is a fight for all working people, and we better make sure the Supreme Court does the right thing, not the corporate thing.

A privacy law written before the subscription economy should not become meaningless just because companies bundle video with something else. European courts tend to treat privacy as a democratic safeguard, and it is unsettling to watch the protection turn on a technical distinction consumers may never even see.

The point of a law is to say what it covers and then stop. If Congress wrote this thing back when a video store was a building with shelves, they were thinking about movie rentals, not every app with a login screen. Now the Court has to guess, and whichever way they rule, somebody is going to be unhappy because the statute never imagined the situation. That is not judicial activism, that is a legislature that would rather punt than rewrite anything. If Congress wants subscription services covered, then pass a new law and put their names on it.