Facebook paid $550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging its facial recognition Tag Suggestions tool stored biometric data without user consent, violating Illinois privacy law.
Facebook faced a class-action lawsuit beginning in 2015 regarding its Tag Suggestions tool, which scanned users' faces in photos and offered suggestions about who that person might be. The lawsuit alleged that Facebook's initial version of this facial recognition technology stored biometric data without user consent, violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. In 2018, Facebook began more transparently explaining its facial recognition technology to users and provided settings to disable it. The company later made facial recognition opt-in only after years of having it enabled by default. A federal judge ruled in favor of making this a class action lawsuit in 2018, and Facebook's appeal was rejected in a 3-0 court decision in August 2019. Facebook agreed to pay $550 million to settle the case, with funds going to eligible Illinois users and covering plaintiffs' legal fees. The settlement amount represents a small fraction of Facebook's $21 billion fourth quarter 2019 revenues. This case represents one of the first major tests of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, with similar cases filed against Google and Snapchat.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that memorize and leak sensitive personal data or infer private information about individuals without their consent. Unexpected or unauthorized sharing of data and information can compromise user expectation of privacy, assist identity theft, or cause loss of confidential intellectual property.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed