Under Illinois law, tech giants and other companies must obtain explicit permission before collecting a wide array of biometric data, including scans of one’s face. Plaintiffs alleged that Facebook ran afoul of those rules as part of a feature meant to spot, identify and recommend tags of users in photos that had been uploaded to the social networking site. Tech giants vehemently oppose such private lawsuits, and in Illinois, Facebook sought to rebuff the case on grounds that users could not prove they had been directly, sufficiently harmed. Facebook tried to take the matter to the Supreme Court, but the justices rejected the case last week. Jay Edelson, a lawyer whose firm represented plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, said late Wednesday that “biometric privacy is one of the biggest fights of the day.”“We are proud of this settlement and hope that others will follow Facebook’s lead,” he added.

Source: Washington Post January 30, 2020 02:31 UTC