More than a million Illinois residents can expect to receive a $397 settlement payment from Facebook this week.
The social network last year agreed to pay $650 million to end a class-action privacy lawsuit filed in 2015, which accused Facebook of collecting and storing biometric data without consent. The money—minus costs and $97.5 million in attorneys' fees—is being split among Illinois Facebook users who filed claims by December 2020, according to NBC News.
Thanks to the state's 2008 Biometric Information Privacy Act, consumers can sue companies for privacy violations involving fingerprints, retina scans, facial geometry, etc. Facebook's payment marks the largest settlement ever agreed under the Illinois law.
The ACLU recently used the Biometric Information Privacy Act to force a settlement with surveillance company Clearview AI, which allegedly collected more than 10 billion faceprints from online profiles across the globe and sold them to customers, including state and local police departments.
Facebook has used facial recognition since 2010, allowing for quick and easy photo tagging and sharing across the network. But while the technology has grown more sophisticated in the past decade, it often proves wrong—particularly when identifying people of color.
Texas sued Facebook parent company Meta back in February for allegedly capturing and using millions of biometric identifiers without users' informed consent—three months after Meta promised to shut down and delete its facial-recognition system. That decision, purportedly due within a few weeks of Meta's announcement, means the social network can no longer automatically spot friends and family in Memories, photos, or videos, or offer tagging suggestions when uploading images.