Facial Recognition

Facebook inflicted a substantial injury on its users by significantly raising their risk of identity theft and intruding upon their personal privacy. In 2010, Facebook stealthily interfered with users' online personal privacy, or at least their expectation of privacy, by collecting intimate details of users' photos in order to develop its facial recognition technology. Facebook's facial recognition technology "generates a bio-metric signature for users who are tagged in photos on Facebook, (i.e., using 'summary data' from 'photo comparisons). What is inexcusable is the fact that Facebook did not provide notice, nor did it obtain the consent of its users prior to withholding such intimate details in the form of Photo Comparison Data, subsequently generating unique bio-metric identifiers, and linking those bio-metric identifiers with individual users.

All of this is particularly horrifying considering the fact that more than 250 million photos are uploaded every day. While Facebook has been secretly stockpiling all of this sensitive information, it has raised a significant risk of harm to over 800 million active users worldwide, approximately 200 million of which are from the United States, by failing to establish procedural safeguards to ensure that their arsenal of personally identifiable information will not fall into the hands of harmful third parties.This significant risk of harm should come as no surprise to Facebook. Facebook has suffered countless security breaches by their apparent disregard for privacy and their Laissez-Faire relationship with advertisers and developers. These security breaches have led to the dissemination and commercialization of users' personally identifiable information to Internet tracking and advertising companies.

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