Security News > 2021 > February > Judge Approves $650M Facebook Privacy Lawsuit Settlement
A federal judge on Friday approved a $650 million settlement of a privacy lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly using photo face-tagging and other biometric data without the permission of its users.
U.S. District Judge James Donato approved the deal in a class-action lawsuit that was filed in Illlinois in 2015.
Nearly 1.6 million Facebook users in Illinois who submitted claims will be affected.
The lawsuit accused the social media giant of violating an Illinois privacy law by failing to get consent before using facial-recognition technology to scan photos uploaded by users to create and store faces digitally.
The state's Biometric Information Privacy Act allowed consumers to sue companies that didn't get permission before harvesting data such as faces and fingerprints.
The case eventually wound up as a class-action lawsuit in California.