Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.
James Martin / CNET
According to a judge, he made what he calls one of the biggest settlements of a privacy lawsuit. It gives Friday an inch to pay Facebook paying $ 650 million to users who claim the company created and stored shame on their faces without permission.
The class action lawsuit, filed in Illinois in 2015, involved the use of Facebook face recognition technology in the photo tagging feature. With the feature, users can tag friends on photos uploaded to Facebook, and create links to friends’ profiles.
The site’s Tag Suggestions program generated automated suggestions using scans of previously uploaded images to identify people in newly uploaded photos. The lawsuit alleges that the scans were created and violated without the consent of the user. Illinois Biometric Data Protection Act, which regulates facial recognition, fingerprints and other biometric technologies in the state.
“Biometrics is one of the two primary battlefields, together with geolocation“that will define our privacy rights for the next generation,” said attorney Jay Edelson, who filed the lawsuit in January 2020. Facebook proposed a $ 550 million settlement. But in the following July, the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge James Donato, said the figure was not high enough.
The final settlement will “place at least $ 345 in the hands of every class member interested in being compensated,” Donato said in his Friday order approving the arrangement. “In any case, the $ 650 million settlement is a significant result,” he said. “It is one of the largest settlements ever due to a violation of privacy.”
Facebook said in a statement on Saturday that it was “pleased that we have reached a settlement so that we can move beyond this matter, which is in the best interests of our community and our shareholders.”
The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act has also affected other companies. Sony’s robot dog, Aibo, has a camera in his nose and face recognition technology, so he can identify people around him 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 scans from millions of students through its classroom software tools.