A lawsuit, targeting the photo-sharing app Instagram, claims that Facebook has been illegally harvesting biometrics data of the app’s users. Last month, Facebook offered to pay $650 million to settle a lawsuit where the accusation was about illegal biometric data harvesting.
In the previous lawsuit, the allegations were about a photo-tagging tool that Facebook gave its users.
The new lawsuit, filed on Monday in the Redwood City, California state court, accuses the company of collecting, storing and financially benefitting from the biometric data of more than 100 million Instagram users.
The company did not inform or get consent from users.
Repeated events
The practice is a clear violation of Illinois privacy laws that ban the unauthorized collection of biometric data. Under this law, the company can be forced to pay $1,000 for every infraction or $5,000, if the lawsuit can prove that they acted intentionally and recklessly.
It was only at the start of this year that Facebook informed Instagram users that they were collecting biometric data, according to the lawsuit. Facebook had not made a response to the suit at the time of writing this.
The lawsuit is Whalen v. Facebook, 20-civ-03346, in the Superior Court of California (Redwood City.)
A series of illegal events
About the earlier case, a judge rejected the offer Facebook made to settle, saying that it was a reduction from the $1,000 set by the Illinois law. If the earlier settlement goes through, the app’s affected users could get paid about $200 to $400 each.
The company has been in the spotlight for illegal business practices. In April, a report saying that Facebook was attempting to buy spyware created by the NSO Group to monitor iPhone users came out.
It is unlikely that they will learn or stop collecting user data in increasingly invasive ways. As for the lawsuit, we’ll find out what’s going to happen in due time.
14 hours ago
