Data is the most valuable resource in the technological era, and among them, biometric data is the cherry on top and is still being handled without respecting privacy.
In this regard, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, have been sued for allegedly violating an Illinois state biometric privacy law. The plaintiffs claim that the three companies obtained without users' permission, an IBM database that contained 100 millions of photographs from the Flickr hosting service.
The database “Diversity in Faces” by IBM was launched last January. The database was encoded to describe the appearance of each subject and was promoted as a step toward eliminating bias in facial recognition. Según los informes, The images added to the database were taken from Flickr without obtaining the consent of the people whose faces were photographed.
Collecting or storing scans of a consumer's facial geometry without their written consent is prohibited in Illinois under a specific privacy law passed to 2008 to protect biometric data and privacy.
The plaintiffs say that their images were included in the dataset without their consent. In four separate class-action lawsuits filed in two different states, it is alleged that Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, And the software company FaceFirst violated Illinois law by obtaining IBM's database “to improve the accuracy” of their own facial recognition technologies.
The defendants chose to take advantage of biometric data and scanned information from photos uploaded from Illinois; managed through user accounts, computers and mobile devices. By doing so, the defendants exposed Illinois residents and citizens to ongoing privacy risks, knowing that their conduct would harm those residents and citizens.
Earlier this year, the plaintiffs filed a case against IBM for violating the same Illinois privacy law when they created the database. Este caso está pendiente en el tribunal federal de distrito del estado. La demanda contra FaceFirst se presentó en el Distrito Central de California, mientras que la queja contra Alphabet, se presentó ante un tribunal federal en el Distrito Norte de California. La demanda contra Amazon y contra Microsoft se presentaron en el Distrito Oeste de Washington.