Facebook is being hit with another lawsuit for amassing facial recognition data on potentially billions of people worldwide.
In the fourth case of its kind, an Illinois man filed suit against Facebook late last month, arguing that state law made the data collection an illegal imposition on his privacy. His complaint points out that Facebook engages in “actively collecting, storing, and using — without providing notice, obtaining informed written consent or publishing data retention policies — the biometrics of its users and unwitting non-users.” It also points out that Facebook has “created, collected and stored over 1 billion ‘face templates.’ ”
That’s just a loose estimate. Facebook states that it has 1.5 billion users. Provided that a third of those users have uploaded a picture of at least one other person who does not use Facebook, the real figure could exceed 2 billion.
According to the complaint, “Facebook creates these templates using sophisticated facial recognition technology that extracts and analyzes data from the points and contours of faces appearing in photos uploaded by their users. Each face template is unique to a particular individual, in the same way that a fingerprint or voiceprint uniquely identifies one and only one person.”
The suit was made possible by the Biometric Information Privacy Act, passed in Illinois in 2008. Texas is the only other state with a similar law on the books, but it has not been used against Facebook.
Jennifer Lynch, a senior attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the challenge to Facebook may be the Illinois law’s first test case.
“To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has tested Illinois’ biometrics law, so it will be interesting to see if the court will find Facebook violated that law,” Lynch told the Washington Examiner. “If the court does find Facebook violated the law, it would require Facebook to ask all of its users in Illinois for their permission to use face recognition before Facebook could use the technology.”
Lynch said she would prefer to see a federal law “that clearly protects our privacy and prevents companies from using our biometrics without consent.” However, because it would be difficult to discern when pictures of Illinois’ nearly 13 million residents are uploaded, a ruling for the plaintiff could have implications for the way Facebook treats all of its users.
Facebook did not reply to requests for comment.
The networking site has come under greater scrutiny as it has loosened privacy policies in recent years. It rescinded an internship for a Harvard student this year after he published research — prior to his internship — revealing how to track users who had installed the company’s “Messenger” application on their smartphones. Last year, it made news for imposing terms of service that grant site administrators unrestricted access to microphones and cameras on phones that have installed the application.
