Is Facebook Sabotaging A Face-Recognition Law? (fortune.com)

"You know something's up when politicians bring up a bill out of nowhere, and then try to ram it through over Memorial Day weekend," writes Fortune. "That's what's happening in Illinois, where state lawmakers -- allegedly at the behest of Facebook and Google -- are poised to gut a law that limits the use of facial recognition technology." An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month a judge refused to throw out a class action complaint against Facebook for using facial recognition software to identify people without their permission and then inviting their friends to "tag" them. Now that suit's lawyer says a so-called "Biometric Information Privacy Act" will actually swap in new definitions for "photograph" and "scan" that will apparently shield Facebook and Google from liability.
The Center for Democracy and Technology called the bill "an unnecessary loss of privacy." Google didn't respond to Fortune's request for a comment, and Facebook said only "We appreciate Senator Link's effort to clarify the scope of the law he authored."

Comments

Summary is utter BS

[raymorris]

The summary is complete bull. Here is the primary change bring made to the law. It used to say:

        Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs

They are trying to update it to say:

        Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, physical or digital photographs

In other words, they are clarifying that yes, a digital photo is a photo. The amendment also has wording stating that this is clarifying, not changing the law - that digital photographs were photographs last week too.

Here's the full text of the amendment. Underlined words are the words being added, words crossed out are being deleted.

http://www.ilga.gov/legislatio...