Lawsuit Against Facebook Again

Without the users’ consent, Facebook has gathered some information regarding the users’ biometric and this is the reason Facebook is going to face another lawsuit.

Illinois’s state law has been breached for an option of “tag suggestions” where users can spot their friends in that uploaded picture.

Though Facebook has claimed that the accusation has no base and they would fight for it vigorously.

On Monday, US District Judge James Donato ruled to certify a class of Facebook users – a key legal hurdle for a class action suit.

This accusation came from the people “of Illinois whom Facebook created and stored a face template after June 7, 2011”, these are the ones who are going to be creating a huge fuss against Facebook.

In a successful class action suit, any person in that group could be entitled to compensation.

Judge Donato wrote, “Facebook seems to believe… statutory damages could amount to billions of dollars”, over this matter.

This decision came days after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced intensive questioning by US lawmakers over the company’s collection and use of user data.

• Zuckerberg: I’m still the man to run Facebook
• Facebook chief’s data was harvested

Facebook brought ‘tag suggestions’ feature on June 2011.

The feature suggests who might be present in uploaded photos, based on an existing database of faces.

In Judge Donato’s ruling, he laid out the four-step process behind the technology:

1. Initially, the software tries to detect any faces in an uploaded photo.
2. It standardizes and aligns them for size and direction.
3. Then, for each face, Facebook computes a face signature – a mathematical representation of the face in that photo.
4. Face signatures are then run through a stored database of user face templates to look for similar matches.

Basically, the face templates, according to the Facebook help page, are made from information about the similarities in every photo the user has been tagged in.

The firm says, “If you’ve never been tagged in a photo on Facebook or have untagged yourself in all photos of you on Facebook, then we do not have this summary information for you.”