[drewcoo]

Is this move intended to justify Patreon taking a bigger cut, so that they can justify the cost of our privacy? They could do that and still siphon off much less than YouTube would.

Alternately, can this be seen as a chink in their armor and a way for someone(s) new to compete in their market?

[apendleton]

Honestly it's probably not some kind of grand scheme. My guess is that whatever engineers or product managers decided to add the Meta Pixel in the first place had never heard of the Video Privacy Protection Act, and either didn't consult their attorneys, or their attorneys hadn't heard of it either, and now the damage is done: they're being sued, and if they lose, they owe a huge amount of money, even if they were to decide today to stop using Meta Pixel from now on, so now their attorneys are throwing whatever they can at the wall to see what sticks.

I doubt the revenue they earn from this is worth the bad PR, so I don't think it's about that, I think it's about avoiding paying damages, which could be $2,500 _per view_ if they were all disclosed to Meta -- potentially billions of dollars. It might well bankrupt the company.

[rchaud]

> Alternately, can this be seen as a chink in their armor and a way for someone(s) new to compete in their market?

The last couple of years in tech tells me there is no "market" that doesn't involve not shuttling your data to the worst companies in the world.