CV NEWS FEED // The Ninth Circuit Court has upheld Meta’s victory in a case where the company was accused of violating Illinois state privacy laws by analyzing the faces of non-Facebook users to create “face signatures.”
According to the Courthouse News Service, the appeal was led by Clayton Zellmer, who claimed that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, mined photos of him and others who do not have Facebook profiles, and thereby violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).
Zellmer’s argument was that despite not having a Facebook profile himself, his information was stored without his consent when friends uploaded photos of him to their accounts.
Meta argued that it cannot be expected to notify or obtain consent from millions of people who appear in photos on its platform but do not have a direct relationship with the company and that it deletes face signatures when there is no match to a user.
While the Ninth Circuit panel affirmed the lower court’s decision to grant summary judgment in favor of Meta, it diverged from the lower court’s primary reasoning.
While the lower court ruled based on the “practical impossibility of Meta’s complying with BIPA if it had to obtain consent from everyone whose photo was uploaded to Facebook,” the Ninth Circuit panel stated that Zellmer and the proposed class members did not demonstrate any concrete harm caused by the alleged privacy violations.
In addition, the panel noted that legal precedent has determined that face signatures are not classified as biometric identifiers under Illinois law.
The court concluded that Zellmer’s argument would imply that any retina, iris, or fingerprint scan is a biometric identifier under Illinois law, which the court did not agree with.
In response to Zellmer’s allegation that Facebook failed to establish guidelines for retaining or destroying face data, the court pointed out that the Seventh Circuit had previously ruled this obligation was to the public in general, not to any specific person. As a result, Zellmer did not meet the required burden of proof for his claims.
