Facebooked to pay $650 million - Class Action Lawsuit
Facebook was ordered to pay $650 million this last Friday, for running afoul of an Illinois law designed to protect the state’s residents from invasive privacy practices.
That law, the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), is a powerful state measure that’s tripped up tech companies in recent years. The suit against Facebook was first filed in 2015, alleging that Facebook’s practice of tagging people in photos using facial recognition without their consent violated state law.
A cluster of lawsuits accused Microsoft, Google and Amazon of breaking the same law last year after Illinois residents’ faces were used to train their facial recognition systems without explicit consent.
A $650 million settlement would be enough to crush any normal company, though Facebook can brush it off much like it did with the FTC’s record-setting $5 billion penalty in 2019.
But the Illinois law isn’t without teeth. For the controversial facial recognition software company Clearview AI, it was enough to make the company pull out of business in the state altogether.
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The lawyers were rewarded $100 million of that sum with other monies awarded to other entities then approx $375.00 awarded to each household in Illinois that would be reliable.
Illinois is known for their hard stance when it comes to their privacy laws.
