SAN FRANCISCO – A federal judge on Friday approved a $ 650 million deal in a privacy lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly using face tagging on photos and other biometric data without the permission of its users.
US District Judge James Donato approved the deal in a class action lawsuit that was filed in Illlinois in 2015. Nearly 1.6 million Facebook users in Illinois who submitted claims will be affected.
Donato called it one of the biggest privacy breach settlements of all time.
“This will put at least $ 345 in the hands of every student interested in being compensated,” he wrote, calling it “a major victory for consumers in the highly contested area of digital privacy.”
Jay Edelson, a Chicago lawyer who opened the case, told the Chicago Tribune that checks can be mailed in two months, unless the decision is appealed.
“We are pleased to have reached an agreement so that we can go beyond this issue, which is in the best interest of our community and our shareholders,” said Facebook, which is based in the San Francisco Bay area, in a statement.
The lawsuit accused the social media giant of violating an Illinois privacy law by failing to obtain consent before using facial recognition technology to digitize user-uploaded photos to create and store faces digitally.
The state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act allowed consumers to sue companies that did not obtain permission before collecting data such as faces and fingerprints.
The case turned into a class action lawsuit in California.
Since then, Facebook has changed its photo tagging system.