The legal arguments, which appear in recent court filings by Facebook and Google, are part of an attempt by the companies to defeat class action claims based of the Biometric Information Privacy Act, a state law that restricts activities such as facial scanning. The law has given rise to a spate of lawsuits that allege companies failed to obtain consumers’ consent before scanning and storing images of their face.
The legal fight over face-scanning is a sensitive one for the two companies, which depend on facial recognition software to run products like Facebook Moments and Google Photos. These pieces of software use artificial intelligence to identify faces among databases of millions of photos.
The lawsuits come at a time when facial recognition technology is largely unregulated in the United States, even as it is being used by more companies, including by retailers to catch shoplifters.
Privacy regulators in other countries, including Canada and many in Europe, have introduced restrictions on the use of facial recognition technology. But for now, it remains largely unregulated in the United States.
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