Ninth Circuit Certifies Privacy Class Action Against Facebook's Photo Tag Suggestion Tool

A panel of the U.S. federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit unanimously rejected Facebook’s attempt to dismiss a privacy class-action alleging that it violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by not securing user consent before recording users’ facial biometrics.

The lawsuit revolves around Facebook’s Tag Suggestion feature, launched in 2010. With Tag Suggestions, Facebook uses facial-recognition technology to analyze whether the user’s Facebook friends are in photos uploaded by that user. Facebook does so by extracting the biometric face-prints of the faces in the photo and then comparing them to those already stored in Facebook’s face-print database. That database comprises of users previously tagged in a photo who have not opted out of Tag Suggestions.