Facebook reaches settlement for lawsuit over facial recognition for $550 million

Facebook has settled a lawsuit over its use of facial recognition in its ‘Tag Suggestions’ feature for $550 million USD (roughly $727 million CAD).

The plaintiffs sued Facebook in 2015, and accused the social media giant of violating the Biometric Information Privacy Act in Illinois by collecting biometric data with users’ consent.

Last year, Facebook decided that it would stop using facial recognition to scan photos by default for the feature. Scanning the photos would create a template of your facial data and would suggest tags in other images based on the data it collected.

“We hope and expect that other companies will follow Facebook’s lead and pay significant attention to the importance of our biometric information,” one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs said in a statement.

The settlement still needs to be approved by a federal judge.

Source: The Wall Street Journal