by fiter on 8/9/19, 5:22 AM
In an opinion by Judge Ikuta, the court “concludes that the development of a face template using facial-recognition technology without consent (as alleged here) invades an individual’s private affairs and concrete interests.” As the court explained, “the facial-recognition technology at issue here can obtain information that is ‘detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled,’ which would be almost impossible without such technology.”Possessing a picture of someone's face is OK, but creating a model that represents that face is not OK if that model can be compared to another picture to categorize it.
Possessing a picture of someones face is OK, and having a human create a mental model that represents that face is OK as well even if that can be compared to another picture to categorize it.
The argument seems to center around how easy/hard or expensive/cheap the process is.
by OldHand2018 on 8/9/19, 12:43 AM
This case is about whether they can be held accountable; it has already been established that they knowingly violated the law. The law says that the aggrieved party can sue for $1000 to $5000 per violation, and Facebook violated the law millions of times.
by toxicFork on 8/9/19, 11:55 AM
Google photos is tracking my face and anyone else whose photos I have taken from my phone and I cannot turn this off. They enable a "search photos by people" feature. I find this creepy and ominous. I never asked for this.
Can I sue them for them to stop?
by mnw21cam on 8/9/19, 7:35 AM
Why just users? Surely people who haven't signed up to Facebook, but have their photos uploaded by someone else and subsequently analysed, should be included?
by windexh8er on 8/9/19, 12:41 AM
How would this apply in a situation wherein a person uploads a picture of a minor that they are not the legal guardian for? Could that person sue the uploader of the photo for damages of having to go after Facebook? If situations like that are feasible under this then I would expect K-12 school districts to implement swift measure to ban all teachers from taking pictures of students as to avoid putting themselves in the middle. I find it egregious public schools don't have better policy on banning social media uploads of minors since it's such a gray area right now.
by samstave on 8/9/19, 11:27 AM
Ok well at risk of being cease and desisted again by FB, in addition to them doing facial recognition - they take pictures and track every vehicle that drives by their HQ and report all those license plates back to Menlo Park.
Its an invasion of privacy of all cars and drivers in the vicinity and should be illegal.
Fuck facebook.
by dfeojm-zlib on 8/9/19, 6:40 AM
One or more US federal agencies place innocent people who happen to work in a sensitive industry on one or more types of watch list that they scrape associated metadata and facial recognition to detect an association with suspicious people/criminals/persons of interest. I know this for a fact because one of my friends at a big name malware forensics got a call from his manager that the government noticed he was tagged in a picture at a conference after-party with someone who was on a "baddies" watchlist.
by bubble_talk on 8/9/19, 5:09 AM
2009: Are you smart enough to be a Facebook engineer?
2019: Are you scummy enough to be a Facebook engineer?
by onetimemanytime on 8/9/19, 10:02 AM
here comes the lawsuit settlement: $147 Million for the lawyers, $5 million for the state and $3 million total for the users that spend 10 hours filling forms.
In other words, this is ineffective. I hope EU cripples them, not even $5B FTC fines scare them.
by saagarjha on 8/9/19, 12:33 AM
This only appears to apply in Illinois, unfortunately.
by thwythwy on 8/9/19, 12:38 AM
9th Circuit.
by isoskeles on 8/9/19, 2:07 AM
I find this sort of litigiousness to be bullshit because it incentivizes signing up for Facebook. I can't be party to some lawsuit against Facebook if I don't have an account ("users").
I deleted my Facebook a few years ago, so if some class-action suit comes out for people who were users in 2018+, where's my payout? How is such a system fair to people who had the sense to either delete before whatever time horizon is used in a case or people who never created an account? None of these people who could win the lottery in court suffered a real loss.