Facebook pays some users for data violations

Some United States residents are receiving cheques from a Facebook settlement, and experts say tech companies will need to keep paying up for violating user privacy, writes Megan Sauer.

If you’ve ever been tagged in a photo online, you might have some cash coming yourway – and soon. Earlier thismonth, more than

1.4 million long and short-term residents of Illinois, in the United States started receiving cheques for up to US$397 (NZ$610), as compensation for a US$650 million class action lawsuit settled against Facebook.

According to plaintiffs, the social media platform illegally used facial recognition data – gatheredwithout consent – to prompt users to tag their friends in photos.

Experts say that’s only the beginning: More cheques from privacy lawsuits are likely on the horizon.

Google Photos and Shutterfly incurred similar class action lawsuits in Illinois, and have entered approval stages of multimillion-dollar settlements within the past year.

In January, sandwich chain Pret A Manger settled a lawsuit – for US$677,000 – alleging that it kept records of its employees’ fingerprints from its timekeeping system, which is also illegal under Illinois’ 2008 biometric privacy law.

The Illinois law is one of the strictest in the United States. Similar laws also exist in Texas and Washington, and are set to go into effect next year in California, Colorado and Virginia.

The spread of such legislation may be timely. According to attorney Paul Geller of Robbins Geller Rudman and Dowd LLP, one of three firms that settled the case against Facebook, the cheques aren’t nearly as eye-opening as the data privacy violations themselves.

‘‘Technology is great, but with things like facial recognition, there’s a dark side to it,’’ Geller tells CNBC Make It.

‘‘People don’t realise that we are being surveilledmore than we know.’’

Being auto-tagged in photosmay not seem like a huge deal, but once tagged, your face can become available to companies outside your photo platform’s walls.

New York-based software company Clearview AI, for example, somewhat infamously claims to have scraped more than 20 billion images fromwebsites like Facebook, YouTube and Venmo for a massive facial recognition database available to paying companies.

‘‘As we walk down the street, everyone can see our face, but only some people can link our face to our name,’’ says Matthew Kugler, a privacy law professor at Northwestern University, US.

The technological ability to instantly link someone’s face to their personal

Privacy law professor at Northwestern University

‘‘As we walk down the street, everyone can see our face, but only some people can link our face to our name.’’ Matthew Kugler