Facebook this week is facing another privacy induced lawsuit after its attempt to halt legal action was refused by a federal appeals court.
The social networking giant had been sued back in 2015 when Illinois users accused Facebook of violating that state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act in collecting biometric data, Reuters reported.
Facebook is already smarting after the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ruled last month that it has to pay a record $5bn fine for ‘repeated violations’ of its 2012 agreement with the FTC – and matters were not helped by the Cambridge Analytica scandal from 2018.
And now in another legal setback, Reuters has reported that a federal appeals court on Thursday rejected Facebook’s effort to undo a class action lawsuit that claimed it illegally collected and stored biometric data for millions of users without their consent.
Facebook is allegedly in hot water because of its “Tag Suggestions” feature, which allowed users to recognize their Facebook friends from previously uploaded photos.
It is worth noting that Facebook suspended facial recognition for European users eight years ago after the practice was deemed illegal, because it stored biometric data without users’ explicit consent.
