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Bloomberg
Facebook Inc agreed to pay $550 million to resolve claims it collected user biometric data without consent in one of the largest consumer privacy settlements in US history.
The accord, which requires a judge’s approval, will avert a trial that may have exposed the social networking company to billions of dollars in damages. Facebook fought unsuccessfully to persuade the US Supreme Court to derail the class action case. The users alleged that the company’s photo-scanning technology violated an Illinois law by gathering and storing biometric data without their permission.
“We decided to pursue a settlement as it was in the best interest of our community and our shareholders to move past this matter,†Facebook said.
While Facebook weathered controversy over privacy almost since its inception, the company has come under particularly harsh scrutiny in recent years, both in the US and in Europe. Consumer privacy cases in US courts occasionally have succeeded in making internet companies change their policies, but have rarely triggered payouts of more than $10 million.
Facebook reached a historic $5 billion deal in July with the US Federal Trade Commission to settle an investigation into its privacy practices stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal that came to light in early 2018. The company is also facing probes by New York, California, Massachusetts and others over its third-party data practices.
Consumer privacy cases in US courts occasionally have succeeded in making internet companies change their policies, but have rarely triggered payouts of more than $10 million. The lawsuit over photo scanning was brought under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act of 2008, the toughest laws of its kind in the U.S.
“Biometrics is one of the two primary battlegrounds, along with geolocation, that will define our privacy rights for the next generation,†Jay Edelson, a Chicago-based lawyer representing consumers who sued, said in a statement.
Facebook has for years encouraged users to tag people in photographs they upload in their personal posts and the social network stores the collected information. The company has used a program it calls DeepFace to match other photos of a person.
Courts have struggled over what qualifies as an injury to pursue a privacy case in lawsuits accusing Facebook, Google and other internet companies of siphoning users’ personal information from emails and monitoring their web browsing habits. Suits over selling the data to advertisers have often failed.