According to its recently published quarterly report, Facebook has agreed to pay a settlement of $550 million due to a lawsuit that has been pending since 2015. The case involves the social network collecting biometric data without the consent of its users, which can be used to automatically tag people in photos. In the state of Illinois, where the lawsuit is being conducted, the Biometric Information Privacy Act states that this is only permitted with the explicit consent of the persons depicted, which Facebook never possessed at any time.
Before the settlement payment can be made, which would end the proceedings, the consent of the judges is still required. Facebook has offered the settlement because regular proceedings and a verdict would very likely lead to an even higher penalty payment.
In addition to the proceedings in the USA, there were also proceedings in Germany due to automatic facial recognition, which were initiated by the Hamburg-based data protection expert Johannes Caspar. In 2013, however, the proceedings were reopened without payment of a fine because Facebook deactivated the function in question again following complaints from various European data protectionists. In the meantime, the feature is back on the social network, but people in photos are only recognized if they have activated the feature beforehand.
Based on the Facebook case, it is questionable whether companies like Clearview AI, which has created a facial database of millions of people based on three billion photos, many of which were collected without their consent, for example by Facebook and YouTube, are also acting illegally.
