Facebook has settled a long-running legal dispute about the way it scans and tags people’s photos.<\/p>\n
It will pay $550m (\u00a3421m) to a group of users in Illinois, who argued that its facial recognition tool was in violation of the state’s privacy laws.<\/p>\n
The case has been ongoing since 2015, and the settlement was announced in its quarterly earnings.<\/p>\n
It comes as facial recognition use by the police, and in public spaces, comes under intense scrutiny.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit against Facebook was given the go-ahead in 2018 when a federal judge ruled it could be heard as a class action (group) case. The appeals court disagreed with Facebook’s attempts to stop this, and in January the Supreme Court also declined to review its appeal.<\/p>\n
The social network told the BBC: “We decided to pursue a settlement as it was in the best interests of our community and our shareholders to move past this matter.”<\/p>\n
Facebook began using facial recognition in the US in 2010 when it automatically tagged people in photos using its tag suggestions tool. The tool scan a user’s face and offered suggestions about who that person is.<\/p>\n
The technology proved controversial at the time. Although users had the option to switch it off, they were not explicitly asked if they had wanted it activated.<\/p>\n
In December 2017 the setting was renamed face recognition and people were able to more easily switch it on or off.\u00a0And in 2019, Facebook made the feature opt-in<\/a>\u00a0as part of its new drive to become more privacy-focused.<\/p>\n “This settlement represents the second major settlement from Facebook in six months. Protecting people’s information and privacy has become a top priority for it and it has more than 1,000 engineers working on privacy-related projects,” said Christopher Rossbach, of investment bank J Stern & Co.<\/p>\n Live facial recognition systems are now being adopted across society, but questions remain about how useful such tools are in recognising faces.<\/p>\n Some cities across the US have banned their use in police body cameras.<\/p>\n In January, the European Union also said it was considering putting a pause on the use of the tech in public, as regulators worked out how to prevent it being abused.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the Chinese government has started rolling out facial recognition in pharmacies in Shanghai. It is for people buying certain drugs, as part of a drive to crack down on the resale of controlled substances and the reuse of certain ingredients in medicines in illegal drugs.<\/p>\n Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"‘Pause’ on use<\/h2>\n