Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
James Martin / CNET
A judge approved what he calls one of the biggest privacy lawsuit deals, giving Facebook approval on Friday that pays $ 650 million to users who claimed the company created and stored scans of their faces without permission .
The class action, filed in Illinois in 2015, involved the use of facial recognition technology in your photo tagging feature. With this feature, users can tag friends on photos uploaded to Facebook, creating links to their friends’ profiles.
The site’s tag suggestion program generated automatic suggestions using scans of previously uploaded images to identify people in recently uploaded photos. The lawsuit claimed that the scans were created without user consent and violated Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which regulates facial recognition, fingerprint and other biometric technologies in the state.
“Biometry is one of the two main battlegrounds, along with geolocation, which will define our privacy rights for the next generation, “said attorney Jay Edelson, who opened the case in January 2020. At the time, Facebook proposed a $ 550 million deal. But the following July, the judge in the case, US District Judge James Donato, said that number was not high enough.
The final agreement “will place at least $ 345 in the hands of all students interested in being compensated,” Donato said in his order on Friday approving the agreement. “In any measure, the $ 650 million deal … is a historic result,” he said. “It is one of the biggest privacy breach agreements of all time.”
Facebook said in a statement on Saturday that it is “pleased to have reached an agreement so that we can go beyond this issue, which is in the interest of our community and our shareholders”.
The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act has also affected other companies. Sony’s robot dog, Aibo, has a nose camera and facial recognition technology, so you can identify people around you and react accordingly. Consequently, Sony does not sell Aibo in Illinois. And last year, two children in the state sued Google for allegedly collecting face images from millions of students through their classroom software tools.