CHICAGO (AP) – Adam Pezen, Carlo Licata and Nimesh Patel are among millions of people who have been tagged in Facebook photos at some point in the past decade, sometimes at the suggestion of an automated tagging feature powered by facial recognition technology.
It was their Illinois addresses, though, that put the trio’s names atop a lawsuit that Facebook recently agreed to settle for $550 million, which could lead to payouts of a couple hundred dollars to several million Illinois users of the social networking site.
The lawsuit – one of more than 400 filed against tech companies big and small in the past five years, by one law firm’s count – alleges that Facebook broke Illinois’ strict biometric privacy law that allows people to sue companies that fail to get consent before harvesting consumers’ data, including through facial and fingerprint scanning. Privacy advocates hail the law as the nation’s strongest form of protection in the commercial use of such data, and it has survived ongoing efforts by the tech industry and other businesses to weaken it.
Attorneys who focus on privacy law predict that the Facebook settlement – if approved by a federal judge – will trigger a new round of lawsuits and make the targets of existing ones more likely to settle. Illinois’ legal landscape also could shape debates over privacy protection in other states and in Congress, particularly about whether individuals should have the right to sue over violations.
“We’re going to see a lot of constituents saying, ‘Why not me?'” said Jay Edelson, a Chicago attorney whose firm first sued Facebook for allegedly breaking Illinois’ law. “This settlement, it’s going to really make the point that having laws on the books is the difference between people getting to go to court and getting real relief, and otherwise just getting trampled by these tech companies.”