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Google Wins Dismissal of Suit Over Facial Recognition Software (bloomberg.com)
A lawsuit filed against Google by users who said the world's largest search engine violated their privacy by using facial recognition technology was dismissed by a judge on Saturday. From a report: U.S. District Judge Edmond E. Chang in Chicago cited a lack of "concrete injuries" to the plaintiffs. The suit, initially filed in March 2016, alleged Alphabet's Google collected and stored biometric data from photographs using facial recognition software, running afoul of a unique Illinois law against using a person's image without permission.
Man, the USA is a strange place to us Germans.
Even before US data protection laws, recording somebody without somebody's permission, and then publishing them, was always illegal. Yes, also in public.
There were/are, of course freedom of the press laws. So in some cases, they were in direct contradiction, and if somebody sued, a judge decided.
Note how it says "and then publishing them". You could still record them.
Because this whole thing was never about acting like you are in private when you are in public.
(Although courtesy dictates that you leave people alone, even in public. Like when a couple is kissing on a bench behind a bush in a public park, you don't go and stare at or record them.)
It was about the problem of making something that should be forgotten when people forget it, permanent for all eternity. ... While even law, on top of basic human decency, dictates, that everybody must have the chance to be forgiven, eventually. Hence prison sentences not being literally forever.
Because then, somebody can still hate you and harass you for something you did, twenty fucking years ago.
And because statistically you can calculate that there are about 5000 people on this planet, who have the will and the means to bloody murder you for something, whatever that something is.
Add those things together, and taking a photo of you, and uploading it online, knowing the above risks, would have to be considered an act of aiding in bloody murder.
(I would not say that, unless I’d have hard real-world statistics on that calculation above, but technically, using common sense, one would have to.)
This is exactly why we have a "right to be forgotten" law in the EU. And data protection laws.
Not that their implementation is good. Or written by people with a clue about the Internet and modern technology. I'm certainly no fan of the EU (nor nationalism/racism, for that matter).
But it's way better than dismissing the problems in their entirety.
The Illinois statute says the plaintiffs are entitled to the greater of:
A) $1,000
B) Their actual injury / loss
The (stupid?) plaintiffs' attorney filed a federal action under title 3 which requires injuries addressed to be "concrete and particularized" and "actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical."
There is no concrete injury here, so it looks like the plaintiff's attorney screwed up. Should have filed in Illinois and taken $1,000 / person. It's possible that they did first file in Illinois and screwed up the jurisdiction argument.
I find it interesting that you would cite the 9th circuit's reasoning in Spokeo, and fail to note that the ruling you cite was overruled by Supreme Court.
As the Supreme Court held in Spokeo:
--
a plaintiff does not automatically satisfy
the injury-in-fact requirement whenever a statute grants a right and purports to authorize a suit to vindicate it. Article III standing requires a concrete injury even in the context of a statutory violation.
--
Are you going to cite Dred Scott next and pretend it's current and correct law?
More from the Supreme Court in Spokeo, the exact case you tried to cite: ...
--
(1) The Ninth Circuit's injury-in-fact analysis elided the independent "concreteness" requirement. Both observations it made concerned only "particularization," i.e., the requirement that an injury "affect the plaintiff in a personal and individual way," Lujan, supra, at 560, n. 1, but an injury in fact must be both concrete and particularized, see, e.g., Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, 573 U. S. Concreteness is quite different from particularization and requires an injury to be "de facto," that is, to actually exist.
We have made it clear time and time again that an injury in fact must be both concrete and particularized.
--
Prior to ubiquitous mobile phone cameras and fixed cameras, there was essentially some level of "privacy" even when in public, because of the impracticality of gathering such data and having the wide scope of data collection to be able to "connect the dots".
Always been legal to have a P.I. tail and photograph you in public.
Always been legal to sit on a bench every day for twenty years and make a note of who passed by.
There were many ways even before smartphones you COULD HAVE easily been tracked if someone cared. Just because there's a lot more data around now does not change the equation even slightly.
What would it even mean to have the right to "public privacy". You can arrest someone from taking a picture of a nice looking park because you happened to be laying the grass? If someone looks at you inadvertently they can be arrested, or later mind-wiped?
The reason why capturing images in public is legal is because anything else is the road to madness and collapse of society.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This isn't true... for quite some time. I don't know why people keep bringing it up. It's not simply about public vs private. It more about an "expectation of privacy" as viewed by the common man. This is the way the Supreme Court has leaned and shot down tracking and going through people's trash without warrants. Yes, in general, being in a public place, one can't expect privacy and vise-verse in a private space.
If you are at a train station and go into a corner to talk softly on the phone.... you have an expectation of privacy in a public space that could be violated. If you have your jacket over your head in the park, someone can't follow you around for that second that your guard is down and snap a picture. There was a expectation of privacy that someone _intended_ to violate.
You need a GDPR style privacy law that bans this kind of thing without explicitly opt-in permission.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC