Facebook Inc has raised its settlement offer by $100 million to $650 million to settle US facial recognition Privacy lawsuit. Facebook is to settle the lawsuit that claimed that it illegally collected and stored biometric data of 1.6 million users of Illinois without their consent.
The social media giant had reached a $550 million settlement in January 2020 regarding the same lawsuit, which had started in 2015. In 2015 users had reportedly accused the company of violating the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act in collecting biometric data by using digital scans of people’s faces through face tagging features of the platform. But in July 2020, the judge in the case had ruled that the amount was insufficient to compensate the users for Facebook’s felony.
Facebook had been accused of storing user’s data as tag suggestions, which has been a feature on Facebook since 2011, it used face matching software to suggest names of people in the users’ photos. This was indicative of how Facebook was clandestinely storing users’ data without their knowledge. After the lawsuit was filed against Facebook, it had decided to keep the facial recognition feature for optional use only.
Though, the default ‘tag suggestion’ feature has been rolled back, it only means that Facebook will no longer suggest your friends to tag you in photos unless you yourself want to be tagged in the post. But facial recognition as a feature is still present on the platform.
A Facebook spokesperson said, “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”.
Even after the rolling back of the ‘tag suggestion’ option on the platform, Facebook has still faced many irregularities since then. In July 2019, US’ Federal Tarde Commission (FTC) had slapped a penalty of $5 billion on Facebook. FTC had stated that Facebook’s facial recognition setting was turned on by default.
The case has been described as ‘ a landmark case’ by various spokespersons and represents a major win for consumers for digital privacy.