Why VPPA forces media brands to choose between compliance and relevance, and how to avoid that tradeoff

Although brands have to navigate complex ecosystems of data privacy policies like the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) to effectively execute sophisticated marketing strategies, the risk of not making your customers feel understood is even bigger.

Successful media and entertainment brands must find a way to make data privacy and disclosure a priority, while maximizing the consumer experiences they deliver.

A Quick VPPA Primer

The VPPA was enacted after a reporter disclosed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's video rental history. It prohibits "video tape service providers" from sharing a consumer's personally identifiable information (PII) linked to their viewing habits without the consumer’s written, informed consent.

For years, it applied to video rental stores. Then streaming arrived. Now, any company with playable video that uses third-party tracking tools like pixels, cookies, or analytics faces VPPA risk.

The Cost of Over-Correcting

Your legal team's caution is justified. The penalties for VPPA noncompliance are harsh. But it's worth exploring how to be compliant without sacrificing the subscriber experience.

When personalization takes a back seat, subscribers notice. Not because they're focusing on your data practices, but because the experience stops feeling relevant. Recommendations miss the mark, messaging feels generic, and engagement quietly drops off. Your engagement team knows that a well-timed push about a subscriber's favorite team or show drives retention, while your legal team knows that third-party tracking must comply with law. Both are right.

Privacy as Foundation, Not Constraint

The teams getting this right aren't choosing between compliance and personalization. They're building engagement strategies where privacy is the architecture, not the afterthought.

That's easier said than done without the right platform.

How Braze Can Help

Braze is a customer engagement platform. We are not a law firm and this should not be deemed legal advice. Your own legal team must determine how to use the Braze platform in compliance with the VPPA. But we do offer several options that might help: Obfuscated events + Connected Content. Instead of storing watch data, such as show titles, in plaintext, your team passes obfuscated event properties to Braze. At send time, Connected Content calls your own API to resolve those values, so a subscriber receives a personalized message ("Love This Team? Here's your game recap") without plaintext viewing data living in Braze. Personalization via connected content happens in the moment; sensitive data stays in your environment.

Field Level Encryption. Braze supports Field Level Encryption using AWS KMS. Your team encrypts certain PII fields - email, phone number - before it reaches Braze. Only ciphertext is stored; decryption occurs at send time. Behavioral data is stored in plaintext for easier segmentation, while the identifiers linking behavior to a real person remain encrypted.

Zero-copy data and CDI Segments. Some teams don't want customer viewing data on any external platform. CDI Segments let you query your data warehouse directly - Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift - to build audience segments without copying data into Braze. Your data stays in your environment, under your governance.

Cross-channel orchestration: Braze links messaging across email, push, in-app, and SMS, offering a seamless experience without spreading data across hard-to-govern, disconnected tools.

So supercharge your experiences and don’t stop innovating. Explore how to manage compliance while rapidly accelerating personalization with a platform like Braze. Bring your users along the data journey with you to knock it out of the park.