We learned yesterday that a judge is allowing a $32B lawsuit to proceed, alleging that Apple Photos face recognition violates a state privacy law.
It has been conflated with Meta’s use of face recognition, despite the two companies’ approaches falling at opposite ends of the privacy spectrum. In allowing the case to proceed, the court fundamentally misunderstands how the feature works …
To properly understand the situation, we need begin with a face recognition lawsuit against Meta dating all the way back to 2015.
Facebook applies face recognition to uploaded photos in order to suggest friends to tag. When you tag someone in one or more photos, Facebook will attempt to recognize that face in other photos to offer tag suggestions. A group of Facebook users from Illinois claimed that this was illegal in the state, violating the Biometric Information Privacy Act.
Since that face recognition was carried out on Meta servers, and Meta was able to identify those faces, the company was indeed breaking the law and was rightly forced to settle the claim for $650 million.
