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Facebook, Shutterfly Face Lawsuits For Using Facial Recognition To ID Photos (computerworld.com)
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.
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.
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 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,
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.)
*beep* *beep* *beep* looks like we found one