Judge approves $650 million settlement of Facebook privacy lawsuit
A US court has approved $650 million settlement of a privacy lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly using photo face-tagging without the users' permission.
Chicago attorney Jay Edelson sued Facebook in Cook County Circuit Court back in 2015, alleging that the platform’s use of facial recognition tagging was not allowed under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
The lawsuit claimed that Facebook’s Tag Suggestions tool, which scanned faces in users’ photos and offered suggestions about who the person might be, stored biometric data without users’ consent in violation of the Illinois law.
The judge called it one of the largest settlements ever for a privacy violation. Nearly 1.6 million people, who had joined the lawsuit filed in 2015, will receive a payout of at least $345. According to the order by Judge James Donato of the Northern District of California.
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