Facebook, Faces and Lawsuits: A Cautionary Tale
Categories: Information Security
“Well we all have a face
That we hide away forever
And we take them out and show ourselves
When everyone has gone”
–Billy Joel
It appears that even if we hide our secret faces away, Facebook knows about them – and is getting sued for it. For several years now, Facebook has used a facial recognition algorithm to identify people in photos posted to the site in order to suggest tagging those it identifies.
While this certainly makes tagging posts easier (and may provide some unintended comedy when the algorithm makes a particularly off-base suggestion), it leads to some privacy concerns. Facebook does allow users to prevent others from tagging them in photos (through the privacy settings of users’ accounts), but it has not made it clear that it was gathering this type of data, nor is it clear what it does with the data, besides using it for photo-tagging.
These concerns are at the core of a lawsuit filed against Facebook by an Illinois man, Carlo Licata, who alleges that Facebook has violated Illinois law “by not informing him in writing that his biometric data was being collected or stored, or when it would be destroyed.” Mr. Licata is seeking class action status for his suit, which would allow other users (at least in Illinois) to participate.
Facebook has already discontinued the practice in Europe, stopping in 2012 after an Austrian student requested a copy of the data Facebook had on him. He discovered that Facebook was collecting information about users without their consent and that the company was retaining information he believed had been deleted.
News like this should make you realize the sheer amount of data that is generated about each of us every day based on our computer and website usage. While it is tempting to think that we are anonymous on the Internet, that’s not true: Many different entities are tracking what we do, what we look at and who our friends are. It’s good to be aware of this and to keep an eye on lawsuits such as Mr. Licata’s; the outcome may tell us even more about how our data is being used.
