Facebook privacy lawsuit for facial recognition leads to $ 650 million settlement

A judge approved what he calls one of the biggest settlements ever in a privacy lawsuit, giving Facebook a boost on Friday by paying users $ 650 million who claimed that the company created and stored scans of their faces without permission.

The class action lawsuit, filed in Illinois in 2015, involved Facebook’s use of facial recognition technology in its photo-tagging function. With this feature, users can tag friends in photos uploaded to Facebook, creating links to friends’ profiles.

The site’s tag suggestions program generated automatic suggestions using scans of previously uploaded images to identify people in newly uploaded photos. The lawsuit alleged that the scans were created without user consent and violated Illinois Biometric Privacy Act, which regulates facial recognition, fingerprinting and other biometric technologies in the state.

“Biometrics is one of the two main battlegrounds, with geolocation, which will define our privacy rights for the next generation, ”said lawyer Jay Edelson, who filed the complaint, in January 2020. Facebook had proposed a $ 550 million settlement. But the following July, the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge James Donato, said that number was not high enough.

The final settlement “will put at least $ 345 in the hands of each class member interested in being compensated,” Donato said in his Friday order approving the arrangement. “Regardless of the measure, the $ 650 million settlement … is a historic result,” he said. “This is one of the biggest privacy violation regulations.”

Facebook said in a statement on Saturday that it was “happy to have reached an agreement so that we can move on this matter, which is in the best interests of our community and our shareholders.”

Illinois’ biometric privacy law has affected other businesses as well. Sony’s robot dog, Aibo, has a nose camera and facial recognition technology, which allows it to identify people around it and react accordingly. Therefore, 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 thanks to its software tools for classrooms.