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Facebook, Shutterfly Face Lawsuits For Using Facial Recognition To ID Photos (computerworld.com)

Posted by timothy on from the who-have-we-here dept.

Lucas123 writes: A federal judge has denied a motion by Shutterfly to dismiss a civil case against it claiming it violated privacy laws by collecting and scanning face geometries from uploaded images without consent. The plaintiff in the case, Brian Norberg, alleges he was never a member of Shutterfly and that other people uploaded photos that included his image. Facebook faces a similar lawsuit for its photo "tag suggestions" feature, but there has as yet been no judgement in the case. In his Shutterfly case ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Norgle rejected the website's argument that only in-person scans of people's faces are covered under the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act, which states that no private entity may collect, capture, purchase, receive through trade, or otherwise obtain a person's or a customer's biometric identifier or biometric information with out their consent.

58 comments

  1. Face book Facing a lawsuit about faces. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Face book Facing a lawsuit about faces.

    Oh the irony is so thick I could make a mud hut out of it.

    1. Re:Face book Facing a lawsuit about faces. by epyT-R · · Score: 1

      Except it ain't mud. It's shit.

    2. Re:Face book Facing a lawsuit about faces. by SailorSpork · · Score: 1

      Face book Facing a lawsuit about faces.

      Yeah, they're really gonna throw the book at them. After they've gone to booking. They'd better book it.

    3. Re:Face book Facing a lawsuit about faces. by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      What book are they going to throw, "Tahiti On Ten Million Per Day?"

    4. Re:Face book Facing a lawsuit about faces. by penguinoid · · Score: 1

      Face book Facing a lawsuit about faces.

      In your face, Facebook. Time to face getting booked.

      --
      Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
  2. I wonder how this applies to Google Photos by Kelson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It lets you search your own photos by person using facial recognition to group photos of the same person together, but it's pretty clear up-front that's what it's doing. Of course, that's up-front to the person *taking* the pictures, not to the person *in* the pictures, so it might run into the same issue with the Illinois law.

    1. Re:I wonder how this applies to Google Photos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, about that. Google Photos is not smart enough to recognize much of anything. Facebook, on the other hand, knows all kinds of different insults based on your photo.

  3. What is "biometric information"? by ooloorie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Face recognition these days uses a lot of deep learning. Deep learning does not use "biometric identifiers" or "face geometry", it operates on the images directly. Furthermore, other than the photos themselves, no biometric information is "collected, captured, purchased, received through trade, or otherwise obtained". So, either the Illinois law considers all photos containing faces "biometric identifiers" and outlaws their distribution without the consent of the person (questionable in light of the First Amendment), or there is a real problem with the law and its interpretation.

    1. Re:What is "biometric information"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Face recognition these days uses a lot of deep learning. Deep learning does not use "biometric identifiers" or "face geometry", it operates on the images directly. Furthermore, other than the photos themselves, no biometric information is "collected, captured, purchased, received through trade, or otherwise obtained".

      So, either the Illinois law considers all photos containing faces "biometric identifiers" and outlaws their distribution without the consent of the person (questionable in light of the First Amendment), or there is a real problem with the law and its interpretation.

      The law deals with "biometric identifiers" as well as "biometric information" and perhaps this lawsuit will hinge on the definitions of the words "scan" and "face geometry". The judge is right to not dismiss the case, both sides should be allowed to determine what "scan" and "face geometry" means here. But the first half of the law lays out the intent of the legislature and it's pretty clear that they don't want private entities to be able to identify you based upon your biological attributes without you consenting to them doing so.

      It's also of note that the law says that private entities are required to store and transmit such biometric identifiers and information at least as securely as other confidential information (such as SSNs and credit card info). That would be a huge undertaking for Facebook and Shutterfly if pictures of people are biometric identifiers or information!

    2. Re:What is "biometric information"? by ooloorie · · Score: 1

      But the first half of the law lays out the intent of the legislature and it's pretty clear that they don't want private entities to be able to identify you based upon your biological attributes without you consenting to them doing so.

      Well, the fact is that "private entities" can identify people based on facial photographs, so their legislative intent is irrelevant: either they have to forbid the sharing of facial photographs, or they have to accept that "private entities" can identify people based on them.

    3. Re:What is "biometric information"? by ooloorie · · Score: 1

      The law deals with "biometric identifiers" as well as "biometric information" and perhaps this lawsuit will hinge on the definitions of the words "scan" and "face geometry"

      Rereading the law, its intention is to safeguard biometric identifiers for recognition. If you apply the intent of the law to facial identification, you would have to outlaw publishing any photograph with a name attached to it, because any photograph with a name attached to it serves as a biometric identifier. But the law then contradicts itself by explicitly saying that photographs are not biometric identifiers. What the law doesn't say is that companies can't engage in biometric identification. Prohibiting Shutterfly or Facebook from performing facial recognition does nothing to enhance anybody's biometric safety. The law is also questionable in another way: the reason it gives for not sharing biometric identifiers really has little to do with attacks on biometric systems; knowing someone's biometric identifiers should not allow people to compromise a properly constructed biometric identification system.

    4. Re:What is "biometric information"? by WarJolt · · Score: 1

      Face recognition these days uses a lot of deep learning. Deep learning does not use "biometric identifiers" or "face geometry", it operates on the images directly.

      It's funny that Deep learning has turned into this new buzzword. It helps to use it correctly. I doubt that most face recognition uses deep learning since deep convolutional neural networks require a large training set to train them. Additionally, they would have issues handling views that have never been seen before. Deep learning is a type of machine learning, but there are other types as well. Read the OpenCV tutorial on face detection. None of those examples use deep learning.

      Even when using machine learning you are using "biometric identifiers" and "face geometry", albeit indirectly. Sometimes you use it directly. Some methods look for eyes, nose, corners of the mouth and use those as inputs for recognition.

    5. Re:What is "biometric information"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      uhm. The law is exactly against what Facebook is doing. Stopping companies from keeping databases with data that can be used to identify them.

      Also, deep learning has to keep some sort of training information from previous images that identify the person...hence, it contains biometric identifiers, just not your standard easy to interpret kind.

    6. Re:What is "biometric information"? by svebk · · Score: 1
      Indeed state of the art systems are using deep learning for face recognition:

      Check rankings on LFW: http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lf..., most of the best performing systems are using deep learning.

      Facebook and Google can easily have millions of labeled face images, and there are now publicly available face databases of 0.5M face images, so training data: not an issue. All systems perform some preprocessing to align faces to a canonical frontal view, so any face image that is not totally a side view is usually well recognized. Strong pose (both tilt and pan), illumination changes and occlusions are still tricky though. Curious about the issue of this lawsuit.

    7. Re:What is "biometric information"? by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      Sorry kiddo, but you refuted yourself.

      ... other than the photos themselves, no biometric information is "collected, captured, purchased, received through trade, or otherwise obtained".

      Right. The only part that breaks the law is the part that is accused of breaking the law.

      Basically what you're saying is just like saying: "Gosh, there is a big flaw in this case, the only thing I stole was the stuff inside the box. I also left the store with a complimentary bag, so since part of what I took wasn't stolen, everything is OK. Right?"

      Yes, the photos are the part that contain the "face geometry." That is correct. It is a simple identity issue; is yes the same as no?

      And while I appreciate that you aspire to understand technology, you can't hand-wave away from the fact that the success of the software in identifying the individuals in the pictures proves that the pictures contain biometric identifiers that their software identifies. It is collected, clearly. How can they not be collecting the photos in question? Are you suggesting that the photos they collected were only failures, where nobody was identified? And how do they have these photos, if they were not collected, captured, purchased, received through trade, or otherwise obtained ?

      The law is in no way premised on a particular type of machine algorithm being used. Perhaps you missed that part. If the photo alone is used successfully to identify the people, then it contains usable biometric data... by definition. If a machine learning algorithm is used to train a system to identify people, then whatever data that system is operating on is the biometric data. Success in identification is full proof. Biometric is not all that complicated a word, after all.

      Biometry in general is the statistical study of biological observations. Biometrics includes the whole field of biometry, and specifically, that biometry which is used to identify individuals. You're going to have a really hard time (read: you will fail) making a case that modern machine learning isn't based on statistical techniques, or that photos of faces aren't a type of measurement of those faces, or that identifying the person whose face is in the image based on computer analysis of the image doesn't involve use of "identifiers."

      Finally, as to your First Amendment attempt, that fails too. Biometric information about me is not creative or transformative (by definition), is not part of the public discourse (it contains no ideas or opinions), and is not your speech. Not every sound that you can make with your mouth will contain protected speech. It is as absurd as claiming a free speech right to give out somebody else's bank account number.

    8. Re:What is "biometric information"? by stephanruby · · Score: 1

      Deep learning does not use "biometric identifiers" or "face geometry", it operates on the images directly.

      That's a tough argument to make, because images of people's faces will correlate with people's faces.

      For instance, a neural network may not have any notion that two eyes (or two pupils) have a proportional distance with another characteristic of the face, but that doesn't mean it can't infer biometric identifiers from images (if given enough sample images and given enough users that are willing to train it by tagging other users and conveniently framing those faces in each sample image given).

      After all, some biometric locks are already using facial recognition to lock/unlock devices (even if they're not very good at it yet). So it will be a tough sell to tell a judge that those so-called "biometric locks" don't use biometric identifiers at all since they're not using traditional human-language-based biometric identifiers.

    9. Re:What is "biometric information"? by martin-boundary · · Score: 1
      That argument is bullshit from someone who doesn't understand machine learning (let alone "deep" learning).

      You can use a machine learning face recognition system to identify "face geometry" features trivially, simply by using the output of the system with a postprocessing layer. The combined system is a system which collects "face geometry". As such, the black box nature of Shutterfly's system doesn't preclude the claimed illegal behaviour. Frankly, the only evidence that Shutterfly and Facebook don't break the law is their word, which suggests the lawsuit is entirely reasonable so that we may get to the bottom of this.

    10. Re:What is "biometric information"? by IcyWolfy · · Score: 1

      The law explictly excludes any data derived from photos: "... Biometric information does not include information derived from items or procedures excluded under the definition of biometric identifiers."

      Since they derived all this information from photographs, it's explictly NOT biometric information.
      So, this lawsuit shouldn't have been heard, as they are clearly deriving all their information from "items excluded under the definition of biometric identifiers" (photographs)

    11. Re:What is "biometric information"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So their software compares photos to photos only, and doesn't create any intermediate data that is used to simplify queries to identify people in a new photo?

    12. Re:What is "biometric information"? by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1

      The problem is, the law is worded as "scan of ... face geometry" and then excludes photographs entirely. These services are deriving their own facial geometry from the photographs, they are not having scans of facial geometry submitted to them, so this should be quite easily defeated at trial.

    13. Re:What is "biometric information"? by blackest_k · · Score: 1

      I'm not so sure on this.
      A photograph is not biometric information just because it is a photograph, you could have 1000's of photographs. After analysing the photographs you can then have biometric data from the face geometry which could be illegal.

      I can grow poppies at home, it is not illegal to have poppies even though they contain opium.
      However if I process these poppies to extract the opium I would then be in violation of a bunch of drug laws. Opium is a class A drug which would attract severe penalties.

      There seems to be a transformative event that changes legal possession of flowers into a class A drug. Arguably there is a similar event when you process photos into biometric data.

      As an aside google wants to replace the version of picasa I have with one without facial recognition. I think possibly due to infringing European laws.

      --
      Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
    14. Re:What is "biometric information"? by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1

      If you can analyse what is essentially public knowledge, why should that ever be illegal?

      As I said before, the law that covers this specifically says "scans of...", which to me means biometric data created specifically and directly - deriving the same information from an exempt source, namely a photograph, seems fine to me.

      Its not illegal to take a photo of you. It should not be illegal to put a name to the contents of that photo, not should it be illegal to derive identifying data from that photo - your features are public knowledge, as is your name, do you dispute that.

    15. Re:What is "biometric information"? by mikael · · Score: 1

      Deep learning is based on "neural networks", which is basically saying "Oh, let the software work it out for itself what the important attributes are". How do you know a neural network isn't creating it's own biometric identifiers or "feature vectors"? It has to create some way of measuring the attributes of a face then determining how closely two faces match. There were papers on Eigenfaces in the past which developed sets of monochrome filters to measure different attributes of a face.

      --
      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
    16. Re:What is "biometric information"? by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 1

      I am sure we would all be happy to publicly inspect Google's face recognition algorithm to be sure that it only uses authorized techniques.

      --
      My first program:

      Hell Segmentation fault

    17. Re:What is "biometric information"? by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 1

      Your argument runs smack into a principle of jurisprudence that says that the court should not read a law in such a way as to make it nonsensical if there's any other plausible reading of it. All biometric ID systems work off of photos (usually digital) taken by the imaging sensor. All scans of face geometry work off of a digital photo from the imaging sensor. The image of the face needs turned into digital data so it can be processed to produce the biometric ID or face geometry data, which means turning the face itself into a digital photograph. So by your reading no biometric identifiers and no uses of them could be outlawed. But the law was specifically written to outlaw certain uses of biometric identifiers. Your reading of the law would make it nonsensical.

      And there is another plausible reading: that photographs and things derived from them are not covered by the law as long as they aren't processed into biometric identifiers. That reading would still give the exemption a purpose, to foreclose the argument that you can't store digitized photographs of people just because they contain all the information needed (after proper processing) to create a biometric identifier, but would avoid making the entire law nonsensical.

    18. Re:What is "biometric information"? by ooloorie · · Score: 1

      So by your reading no biometric identifiers and no uses of them could be outlawed.

      Any and all biometric identifiers that can't be derived from regular media can be outlawed.

      And there is another plausible reading: that photographs and things derived from them are not covered by the law as long as they aren't processed into biometric identifiers.

      You could pass such a law, but it doesn't serve the stated purpose of the law, namely to protect people from theft of their biometric identifiers.

      Your reading of the law would make it nonsensical.

      The law is nonsensical, and it's not fixable by reinterpretation. The only way to make the law sensible is to simply strike facial identification and any other biometric identifiers that can be derived from photographs, audio, video, or text from the scope of the law.

    19. Re:What is "biometric information"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can use a machine learning face recognition system to identify "face geometry" features trivially, simply by using the output of the system with a postprocessing layer.

      You could. And then they would have created a private biometric identifier, but that still wouldn't violate the intent of the law, which is to prevent (I'm paraphrasing) "the biometric identifiers of people to become public". A "biometric identifier" you create in your basement is not something this law is supposed to protect against.

      Frankly, the only evidence that Shutterfly and Facebook don't break the law is their word, which suggests the lawsuit is entirely reasonable so that we may get to the bottom of this.

      The only evidence that you don't break the law on biometric identifiers is your word. Maybe the police should raid the basement room where you live?

      That argument is bullshit from someone who doesn't understand machine learning (let alone "deep" learning).

      Well, you're obviously an "expert" in machine learning, and even more obviously an idiot at anything else.

    20. Re:What is "biometric information"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even when using machine learning you are using "biometric identifiers" and "face geometry", albeit indirectly.

      No, such systems do not use "biometric identifiers", because a biometric identifier isn't just biometric information that can identify you, it's biometric information that is used to identify you in particular ways. If you expand the meaning of "biometric identifier" to what Facebook and Shutterfly are doing, the term becomes meaningless.

      Read the OpenCV tutorial on face detection. None of those examples use deep learning.

      OpenCV's techniques are thoroughly outdated and weren't even that great to begin with.

    21. Re:What is "biometric information"? by ooloorie · · Score: 1

      Biometry in general is the statistical study ...

      And there is your problem: you don't understand what the law is actually about. Yes, in a generic sense, deep learning creates numbers that identify people biometrically internally. Those numbers are not "biometric identifiers" within the meaning of the law. The law is intended to protect people from identity theft by protecting their "biometric identifiers". There are some well defined "biometric identifiers" for faces, but Facebook or Shutterfly are not using them because they are, frankly, not very good for their purposes.

      Finally, as to your First Amendment attempt, that fails too. Biometric information about me is not creative or transformative (by definition), is not part of the public discourse (it contains no ideas or opinions), and is not your speech.

      I'm not arguing that the biometric identifiers are a First Amendment issue, I'm arguing that attaching names to photographs is a First Amendment issue. Once you allow people to publish names attached to photographs, your facial "biometric identifier" is out there, and there is nothing any law can do about that. You could pass a law that forbids automatic face recognition in photographs somehow, but that's not this law.

    22. Re:What is "biometric information"? by ooloorie · · Score: 1

      That's a tough argument to make, because images of people's faces will correlate with people's faces.

      No, I'm making a very simple argument, actually. There are things called "biometric identifiers" and "face geometry", and they are not just "biometric information that can be used to identify you".

      A "biometric identifier" is a well-defined set of numbers used by a "biometric identification system", and within the scope of the law, that amounts to something used for access control and similar purposes ("face geometry" is roughly synonymous within this context, being used by older biometric identification systems). The law is expressly intended to protect people against the situation where I obtain your biometric identifier that is used by some biometric identification system and then impersonate you. It's a stupid law to begin with, because that's a really unlikely attack on biometric identification systems, but that is what it is intended to do.

      When it comes to face biometrics, whatever Facebook computes internally in their neural network is not a "biometric identifier" because it's never actually used like a "biometric identifier" in the sense of the law, by anyone in the world. Furthermore, they don't even publish those numbers, and the numbers change every time they retrain their machine learning algorithm.

      The original photo with your name attached to it is what puts you at a (small) risk of biometric impersonation, not Facebook's internal face recognition. You may not like that companies like Facebook run large scale face recognition on photographs, and you might want to try to get a law passed to prohibit that, but this law wasn't intended to do that.

    23. Re:What is "biometric information"? by ooloorie · · Score: 1

      How do you know a neural network isn't creating it's own biometric identifiers or "feature vectors"?

      A "biometric identifier" isn't just "biometric data that identifies you", it's an explicit piece of data you can use to let a biometric system verify your identity. The law is intended to address a particular (supposed) weakness of "biometric identifiers" in biometric identification systems, namely that they can't be reissued if compromised. That simply doesn't apply to Facebook's use of face recognition, or their internal feature vectors.

    24. Re:What is "biometric information"? by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      Right, the photograph itself, not having been run through an identity-extractor program, is explicitly not a biometric identifier. But whatever the computer software is internally generating in order to make an identification is. The act of automatically identifying people with the machine implies additional steps where biometric identifiers are extracted. As they say, "the proof is in the pudding." Can it identify people, or not?

    25. Re:What is "biometric information"? by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1

      That doesnt make it illegal under the law tho - processing the photo to generate biometric data does not fall under the auspices of what is controlled by the law in this case

    26. Re:What is "biometric information"? by DedTV · · Score: 1

      So, either the Illinois law considers all photos containing faces "biometric identifiers"

      It doesn't. The Illinois law they're using to sue considers face geometry scans a "biometric identifier", but it specifically excludes photographs as biometric identifiers.
      The plaintiffs are claiming that the defendants digitally "scanned" the facial geometry from the photos, which exposes an ambiguity in the law and a Federal judge basically said he wasn't going to resolve ambiguities within the state's statute and left the issue in the hands of the state courts.

      In the end, the suit is likely to fail, at least on the privacy issue. If it doesn't, it could make simply recognising someone in a photo a criminal act. While an involuntary basic human ability, it requires one to visually "scan" the photo and match it up to a mental database of "scanned" faces which the plaintiff's claim the law makes illegal. Of course, there's been far worse legal decisions so who knows? A positive outcome for the plaintiffs would certainly make many lawyers very, very happy.

    27. Re:What is "biometric information"? by ooloorie · · Score: 1

      The Illinois law they're using to sue considers face geometry scans a "biometric identifier"

      The Illinois law has a stated purpose, namely that of preventing theft of biometric identifiers. As far as face-based biometrics is concerned, that purpose could be served by outlawing attaching names to photographs without consent (with obvious First Amendment issues); it is not served by preventing Facebook from recognizing people in photographs by any means they like.

      It doesn't.

      It excludes face photographs, but that is a contradictory exclusion, given that the law also attempts to protect face biometrics data, as is evident from the fact that it includes "face geometry". My point is that the law isn't "ambiguous" as written, it is simply inconsistent: what it legislates does not actually serve its stated purpose.

      If it doesn't, it could make simply recognising someone in a photo a criminal act.

      State legislators could probably make "using a computer to automatically identify people in photographs" a criminal act. Apparently, that's what the plaintiffs want for some reason. However, such a law would have nothing to do with the stated purpose of the biometrics law, which is to make biometric identifiers more secure and trustworthy.

  4. Relevant Illinois law: does not include photos by raymorris · · Score: 5, Informative

    The law under which the suit was filed:
    http://www.ilga.gov/legislatio...

    The law lists what is and what is not a "biometric identifier ":

            "Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan,
              fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry.
              Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples,
              written signatures, photographs,

    1. Re: Relevant Illinois law: does not include photos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The law under which the suit was filed:
      http://www.ilga.gov/legislatio...
      The law lists what is and what is not a "biometric identifier ":
                        "Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan,
                            fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry.
                            Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples,
                            written signatures, photographs,

      Which bit of "federal" don't you understand, Roy?

      That judge must be quite some moron, eh?

    2. Re: Relevant Illinois law: does not include photos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Norberg filed the civil case under state law. Shutterfly went to a federal judge to have it dismissed.

    3. Re: Relevant Illinois law: does not include photos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      lol reading comprehension fail...lol you are a fucking idiot lol! ur mother should of killed you at birth loool!

    4. Re:Relevant Illinois law: does not include photos by stephanruby · · Score: 1

      The law under which the suit was filed:
      http://www.ilga.gov/legislatio...

      The law lists what is and what is not a "biometric identifier ":

              "Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan,
                fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry.
                Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples,
                written signatures, photographs,

      And yet, Facebook doesn't just store photographs, if Facebook only stored photographs, then it would have a heck of a time trying to query information every time there was a Facial Recognition query.

      It's just like Shazam, while I am sure that Shazam possesses the music track of every possible song out there. There is a lot processing, analysis, and audio indexing/voice printing that is done on those music tracks so that Shazam is able to recognize a music track in a room full of ambient noise or recognize a short music clip distorted and spliced into another song.

    5. Re:Relevant Illinois law: does not include photos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Some face recognition work on measuring various attributes like eye-pupil distance, mouth width, height of nose, distance from middle of mouth from top of nose. Those are estimated from a photograph.

      A fingerprint read takes a photograph of a fingerprint and looks for particular features like branches, centre points of the end of a spiral.

      Retina scan takes a photograph of an eye, and does measurements on the different filaments on the iris, or it analyzes the pattern of blood vessels in the retina.

  5. Without consent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Those photos don't even belong to you anymore. Once you upload them, they belong to the Corporation.

  6. So by Ryanrule · · Score: 0

    Hows the dick recognition software coming?

    1. Re:So by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Asians are offended it asked if it was cold outside.

    2. Re:So by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Not bad. I can recognise you.

    3. Re:So by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And for you it asked "Is that your clitoris?"

    4. Re:So by Aighearach · · Score: 2

      *beep* *beep* *beep* looks like we found one

  7. upload=lost by turkeydance · · Score: 1

    pfffft.

  8. be an asshole OR be clueless by raymorris · · Score: 1

    Sometimes you're an asshole, sometimes you're clueless. Try not to be an asshole when you're clueless.

    The case (
    http://digitalcommons.law.scu.... ) accuses Shutterfly of violating Illinois state law. There is no federal legislation on the subject. It's being heard in the US District Court for Illinois because the Class Action Fairness Act allows a federal court to hear an interstate claim - Shutterfly is a Delaware corporation.

  9. Federal v. State Courts by Etherwalk · · Score: 2

    Norberg filed the civil case under state law. Shutterfly went to a federal judge to have it dismissed.

    State courts can usually hear cases under federal law. Federal Courts can ALSO hear cases under state law when there is a federal law specifically allowing them to do so. The most common is "Diversity Jurisdiction," which occurs when the plaintiff and defendant are from different states and enough money is at stake. Basically it's recognizing that state courts van have a problem favoring the guy from their state over the out-of-towner, and also that for cases where a lot of money is involved, you often want more than your local overworked state court to think about it. (There are some state courts that are excellent, of course, but usually federal courts have more time and are a bit more cerebral and a LOT more impartial. Because they don't have to be re-elected, and they do have to work with colleagues from across the aisle.)

    1. Re:Federal v. State Courts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Geez, what's wrong with you? Norberg filed the case under state law in state court. Get the f*cking facts.

    2. Re:Federal v. State Courts by Etherwalk · · Score: 1

      Geez, what's wrong with you? Norberg filed the case under state law in state court. Get the f*cking facts.

      Why? Random idiots are bleating away and the supposed summary doesn't actually link to anything. Better to provide some basic context on how state law cases can wind up in federal courts. Researching the specific case docket history is not something you do for a slashdot post.

      This case may actually be in Federal Court under the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 rather than diversity jurisdiction--applies where the amount in controversy is greater than $5 Million, there is some diversity, and at least 100 plaintiffs are involved. Whether it was initially filed in state or federal court doesn't really matter, so long as the court it's in has jurisdiction--what matters is where it is now. Judge Norgle, a Federal District Judge, is the one who denied the motion to dismiss. See, e.g., http://www.jdsupra.com/legalne...

    3. Re:Federal v. State Courts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Geez, what's wrong with you? Norberg filed the case under state law in state court. Get the f*cking facts.

      Why would he? It's /., we don't deal with facts.

  10. Re:What is "biometric information"? Not Photos. by IcyWolfy · · Score: 1

    The law also says:
    "... Biometric information does not include information derived from items or procedures excluded under the definition of biometric identifiers"

    So, any information derived from photographs (items excluded under the definition of biometric identifiers), is not biometric information.

    Since they derived all this information from photographs, it's explictly NOT biometric information.

  11. yes, complaint is under CAFA by raymorris · · Score: 1

    > This case may actually be in Federal Court under the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005

    Indeed the plaintiff claims federal jurisdiction under Class Action Fairness Act.
    http://digitalcommons.law.scu....

  12. Oblig. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "With this technology, we have finally defeated privacy!" -- Dr. Bhamba (happily)

  13. Wait, who? by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 1

    Facebook, Shutterfly Face Lawsuits For Using Facial Recognition To ID Photos.

    I read that as "Facebook, Fluttershy face lawsuits..."

    I'm glad she's not being sued. <whisper>Yay!</whisper>