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Facebook must face a class action lawsuit over its use of facial recognition technology, a California judge has ruled.
The lawsuit alleges that Facebook gathered biometric information without users' explicit consent.
It involves the "tag suggestions" technology, which spots users' friends in uploaded photos; the lawsuit says this breaches Illinois state law.
Facebook said the case had no merit and it would fight it vigorously.
On Monday, US District Judge James Donato ruled to certify a class of Facebook users - a key legal hurdle for a class action suit.
The class of people in question is Facebook users "in Illinois for whom Facebook created and stored a face template after June 7, 2011", according to the court order.
In a successful class action suit, any person in that group could be entitled to compensation.
In his order, Judge Donato wrote: "Facebook seems to believe... statutory damages could amount to billions of dollars."
The decision comes days after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced intensive questioning by US lawmakers over the company's collection and use of user data.
June 2011 was the date on which Facebook rolled out its "tag suggestions" feature.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Wednesday April 18 2018, @05:55PM (1 child)
That explains the "only in Illinois" part, but not the "only Facebook users" part. It should have been "anyone in Illinois whose facial data was stored and analyzed by Facebook".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 18 2018, @06:07PM
This may be due to specifics of the law.
Hypothesis: the law doesn't anticipate that Evil Corp would also track and abuse the personal info of NON-USERS of its platform.
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