Security News > 2020 > February > Unique Illinois Privacy Law Leads to $550M Facebook Deal
The lawsuit - one of more than 400 filed against tech companies big and small in the past five years, by one law firm's count - alleges that Facebook broke Illinois' strict biometric privacy law that allows people to sue companies that fail to get consent before harvesting consumers' data, including through facial and fingerprint scanning.
"We're going to see a lot of constituents saying, 'Why not me?'" said Jay Edelson, a Chicago attorney whose firm first sued Facebook for allegedly breaking Illinois' law.
Although the buying and selling of consumer data has become a multi-billion-dollar industry, Illinois' law - the Biometric Information Privacy Act - predates even Facebook's iconic "Like" feature and was a reaction to a single company's flop.
The Illinois law is the basis for two recent suits filed against Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that harvests images by scraping social media sites and other places and then sells access to its database to law enforcement agencies.
Illinois' law puts "Litigation over innovation," said Tyler Diers, the Illinois and Midwest executive director of the industry group TechNet, whose members include Apple, Facebook and Google.