US District
Judge James Donato approved the deal in a class-action lawsuit that was filed
in Illinois in 2015. Nearly 1.6 million Facebook users in Illinois who
submitted claims will be affected.
Donato
called it one of the largest settlements ever for a privacy violation.
“It will
put at least $345 into the hands of every class member interested in being
compensated,” he wrote, calling it “a major win for consumers in the hotly
contested area of digital privacy.”
Jay
Edelson, a Chicago attorney who filed the lawsuit, told the Chicago Tribune
that the checks could be in the mail within two months unless the ruling is
appealed.
“We are
pleased to have reached a settlement so we can move past this matter, which is
in the best interest of our community and our shareholders,” Facebook, which is
headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, said in a statement.
The lawsuit
accused the social media giant of violating an Illinois privacy law by failing
to get consent before using facial-recognition technology to scan photos
uploaded by users to create and store faces digitally.
The state's
Biometric Information Privacy Act allowed consumers to sue companies that
didn't get permission before harvesting data such as faces and fingerprints.
The case eventually
wound up as a class-action lawsuit in California.
Facebook
has since changed its photo-tagging system.
0 comments:
Post a Comment