Facebook has settled a lawsuit over its facial recognition practices for $550 million. Originally filed in an Illinois federal court 2015, the lawsuit’s plaintiffs were represented in the class-action by the Edelson, Labaton Sucharow, and Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd law firms.
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The suit against the social media giant accused it of violating privacy laws in Illinois for its option for users to tag other people (their Facebook “friends”) in photos. Given the number of plaintiffs, the average amount to be received by each would amount to approximately a couple of hundred dollars each, depending the 5-6 million Facebook users in the state of Illinois that could file claims, per one of the lawyers, Paul Geller.
The company’s top brass, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, announced the settlement in a conference call on Wednesday, January 29th, as they were discussing fourth quarter 2019 results. In the same call, CFO David Wehner pointed out “full-year 2019 revenue grew 27% to $71 billion and we generated over $18 billion in net income.” Facebook shares have decreased by approximately 10% since the conference call.
As part of our FTC settlement, we committed to building privacy controls and auditing that will set a new standard for our industry – going beyond anything required by law today. We currently have more than 1,000 engineers working on privacy-related projects and helping to build out this program. Related to this, just yesterday we announced we’re rolling out a Privacy Checkup tool to nearly 2 billion people reminding them of the controls they have and making sure they’re set the way they want them. We also introduced a new tool that notifies you anytime your account signs into a new service. So it’s going to take time, but over the next decade I want us to build a reputation for privacy that’s as strong as our reputation around building good, stable services.
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Reference: Chicago Tribune
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