It’s 1987. The scene is Capitol Hill. Ronald Reagan has nominated whip-smart but gruff appeals court judge Robert Bork for a seat on the US Supreme Court.

Bork’s hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee are chaired by a sharp young senator with an eye on the presidency, Joseph R. Biden. And it’s all on the line: the right to privacy and reproductive freedom, civil rights, racial and gender equality. Also the presidency. As solicitor general, Bork carried out Richard Nixon’s order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a key moment in Watergate’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”

Behind the scenes, things were quite different. When the legislative work was done, the nation’s most powerful retreated to their tony residences in Georgetown and close-in Capitol Hill. Drawing the shades and dimming the lights, they relaxed by watching some special movies. Candlelight, a glass of wine, a warm afghan? All leant to the ambience as leading political figures enjoyed an indulgence long denied them. They watched movies with adult themes.

Before the VCR, watching movies with sexual content in theaters carried too much political risk. You didn’t want that in the papers. Now there were shops where politicians could rent such movies (or send their wives to discreetly do so). They watched Body Double, American Gigolo, 9½ Weeks, and similar boundary-pushing films. It was possible to rent every film in the Emmanuelle series. Deep Throat was not only a source for Woodward and Bernstein, you know.

But on the morning of September 25, 1987, the Washington City Paper published a story that would change everything. Reporter Michael Dolan recounted what he had found in the video rental records of the controversial Supreme Court nominee. Part of Dolan’s motivation was to pique Bork’s skepticism about privacy.

“The Bork Tapes” was a glib but ponderous and self-indulgent article, confessing the lack of anything controversial. (“Judge Bork seems to be a PG-to-G sort of fellow.”) But powerful husbands and wives sat up in bed, looked at each other, and said, “Could that happen to us?” The result was the fastest passage of privacy legislation in history: the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA).

Much of the story above is fictionalized, including the speed of the VPPA’s passage, which took a year. But I am ever amused that national political leaders probably focused on privacy in this particular category due to the risk of appearing naughty.

The VPPA saw argument in the Supreme Court last week. Salazar v. Paramount Global is a statutory interpretation case exploring whether a sports website violated the VPPA when it handed data about the video clips Salazar watched to Facebook, which used it to customize ads. It is nothing to spill wine on your afghan about.

But Salazar reveals some “versions” of privacy that are highlighted in my forthcoming legal casebook with Jane Bambauer of the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law.

Privacy generally centers on control. In a sense, people have privacy simply by having control of information about themselves. We catalog legal protections for control of both collection and disclosure.

People also use control in service to values and goals such as reputation. Another interest we identify is resistance to commercialism. Many don’t care, but many people really do not want to be the product or the advertisement. The distance between the VPPA’s origin story and the Salazar case illustrates the difference between privacy as reputation and privacy as anti-commerce.

The VPPA came about to protect against embarrassing disclosures of information. Oh, yeah. Members of Congress and senators did not want a window opened onto their bow-chicka-wow-wow.

In Salazar, the offense is the passage of frankly boring information from one machine to another to optimize advertising.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh summarized the difference during oral argument: “Well, isn’t there a concern about repurposing a statute that was really about public disclosure of what individuals viewed into a statute that regulates data sharing for targeted advertising on the internet? Those are very different things.”

Not entirely different, Justice Elena Kagan noted elsewhere: “Let’s say a judge . . . watches some pretty funky sports videos, you know, like a lot of women wrestling or something. (Laughter.)”

The details of the VPPA’s terms and how the Court will resolve them are a little down in the weeds. There is a whiff of possibility that the “harm” of receiving custom ads is not bad enough to give Salazar standing to bring his class action in federal court. It threatens substantial liability for many internet websites.

For now, let us focus through privacy at the Supreme Court on what helped make the internet, and the VCR before it, into socio-technical juggernauts: naughty movies.