Facebook brings face recognition to all users, discontinues ‘Tag Suggestions’ amid privacy legal battle
- Facial recognition notifies users if their profile photos are used by someone else or if they appear in photos where they have not been tagged
Facebook said on Tuesday its facial recognition technology would now be available to all users with an option to opt out, while the social media platform also decided to discontinue a related feature called “Tag Suggestions”.
Face recognition, available to some Facebook users since December 2017, notifies an account holder if a profile photo is used by someone else or if the account holder appears in photos in which he or she has not been tagged.
Tag Suggestions, which used face recognition only to suggest a user tag friends in photographs, has been at the centre of a privacy-related lawsuit since 2015.
That lawsuit, by Illinois users, accused Facebook of violating the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, claiming it illegally collected and stored biometric data of millions of users without their consent.
Last month, a federal appeal court rejected Facebook’s effort to void the lawsuit’s class-action status.
