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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: 2) by Justin Case on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:37AM (2 children)
OK so now that we agree there were (very effective) bad people before technology, your thesis is what exactly? That it is OK for nerds (or more often their employers) to use technology to mass-attack billions of unsuspecting people -- some of whom (as discussed elsewhere) never even consented or used the "service"?
(Service: what a stud does to a mare.)
(Score: 2) by LVDOVICVS on Thursday April 19 2018, @02:41AM (1 child)
It's not the technology, it's who's using it and for what.
If one chooses to appear in public, it is legal to photograph them. It is not illegal to identify them. No permission or consent is required. I'm talking specifically about the U.S.
I can certainly see how the government could use this technical ability to its advantage. Some guy in China got picked out of a crowd I read. Suing Facebook is not going to make an iota of difference in what the government is doing. And whether the identification is being done by computers or thugs in front of screens is really secondary to the issue of the prevalence of surveillance in society. The larger matter is how much the government should be spying on people by any means.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:10PM
Except that Facebook builds shadow profiles about people who don't even use their disservice. Others can upload pictures of you without your permission, which can then have your name tagged and have facial recognition algorithms run on it.
Wait, I know: Never appear in public. Wow! What a practical solution which is 100% possible to do while living in a so-called civilization. Or, how about we have real privacy laws that stop companies like Facebook from conducting mass surveillance on the populace?
We should sue Facebook into oblivion and tackle government surveillance. These are not mutually exclusive.
The government should simply not be allowed to conduct mass surveillance on the populace. Ever. Surveillance should always be highly targeted and approved by a court, as required by the fourth amendment.