By financen | August 23, 2018 - 4:15 pm - Posted in Law, Laws, Legal

In San Francisco, US, a judge rejected a request by Facebook to toss out a civil lawsuit against them. Facebook was accused of violating privacy rights with face recognition software to help ‘tag’ people in their pictures.

According to the US District Court Judge, James Donato, the lawsuit was filed by three Illinois residents under the auspices of the State Biometric Information Privacy Act.

The court said that the Facebook’s face recognition technology involves a scan of face geometry done without plaintiff’s consent.

In Illinois, the legislators had earlier passed the act to address emerging biometric technology such as facebook face-recognition software

In a motion to defense, Facebook had argued to dismiss that analyzing uploaded photographs did not qualify as biometric data and that the Illinois law did not apply.

As stated in the 24 page ruling, Facebook has now modified its terms of service to state that they are governed under California Law, but timing and circumstances permit the application of the Illinois act in the suit.

The court accuses Facebook of illegally collecting biometric data from faces in pictures and storing it secretly without consent for a feature that will allow people to tag friends by name at the social network sites.

Plaintiff’s lawyers contend that Facebook is in violation of Illinois law because biometric identifiers in the form of facial geometry are gathered, stored and then they are used for tagging suggestions at the California-based social network site without permission.

The suit has not clarified about the damages yet, and comes as Internet titans such as Facebook, Google. Others are investing heavily in artificial intelligence to understand and cater to users of online offerings.

 

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