Facebook accused of inappropriate use of facial recognition software
Facebook is being taken to court by an Illinois man who alleges that the social media platform broke state law through its use of biometric data to power its tag suggestions feature.
In a lawsuit filed at Illinios’ Cook County Circuit Court Carlo Licata complained that he ‘never gave permission for Facebook to collect or store biometric data, nor was he notified or given an opportunity to prohibit or prevent it from doing so.”
Launched in 2010 the tag feature employs facial recognition algorithms to automatically identify people in photos and provide suggestions for who they might be, encouraging users to identify friends and family members on shared photos.
A privacy feature does allow users to disable this feature for photos of themselves but it still retains the biometric data behind the scenes. Facebook is also currently in the early phases of developing a ‘near human’ level of facial recognition accuracy with its DeepFace program.
Facebook has dismissed the case as being ‘without merit’ and promised to ‘vigorously’ defend itself in court.