A US judge has approved a $650 million settlement in a privacy-related lawsuit against Facebook, which had accused the company of violating an Illinois biometric privacy law by harvesting facial data for its photo-labelling service, Tag Suggestions. This, the lawsuit had claimed was being done without seeking permission from users and without informing them about how long their data would be stored. Tag Suggestions, which has been a feature on Facebook since 2011, uses face-matching software to suggest names of people in the users’ photos. The lawsuit was filed in Illinois in 2015, for violating Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. This legislation requires companies to obtain written permission from subjects before the collection of a person’s biometric information. It gives residents the right to sue companies for upto $5,000 for each violation. Facebook’s history with face recognition software In November 2019, we had reported that Facebook was testing a facial recognition system on its mobile app to verify whether users were humans or bots. The current status of this yet-unreleased feature is unclear. In September 2019, the company said that users would have to to opt-in to its ‘face recognition’ feature — which was used by default — to provide tag suggestions. The default ‘tag suggestions’ feature was rolled back. However, it only meant that Facebook could no longer suggest your friends to tag you in photos, unless you wanted to. Facial recognition, as a feature, continues to be present on the platform. In July 2019, US’ Federal Trade Commission (FTC) slapped a $5 billion penalty on Facebook for misrepresenting users’ ability…
News
Facebook to pay $650 million for facial recognition feature as US Judge approves privacy settlement
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...