Facebook may have to pay billions of dollars in penalties for face recognition

The ruling against the social networking giant was made at a federal appellate trial on the 2015 lawsuit alleging that Facebook violated the Illinois Biometric Information Security Act (court documents).

Illinois law requires the company to make a public announcement when using biometric data including facial recognition scanning. Facebook uses these data for tagging (tagging) feature, identifying the face of the person in the photo and proposing to tag the profile without the user’s consent.

“We conclude that developing a face template using facial recognition technology without consent (as allegedly here) violated privacy and personal interests,” the court said. said in court on Thursday.

According to Reuters, Facebook may have to pay another huge fine – if the court’s decision does not change, because the face identification violation has affected millions of users. However, Facebook will not give up so easily.

Facebook spokesman said the company will seek advice and review this ruling. “We always openly use face recognition technology and users can turn it off at any time.” Facebook representative said that he would bring the lawsuit to the high court if necessary.

This is the second time Facebook has been condemned for using face detection technology without informing users. Last month Facebook had to pay a $ 5 billion fine to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) due to violations of the technology.

According to FTC, Facebook “deceived more than 10 million users using the face recognition feature called tagging because it is turned on by default” and Facebook must update data about privacy policies for people. Users have the right to choose whether or not to use this feature for their account.

This is the largest fine in the history of FTC, Facebook was also fined 100 million USD by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the same day because of abuse of user information.