Social media and technology company Facebook has settled a long-running legal dispute regarding its facial recognition tool for $550 million.
Facebook has decided to settle a legal dispute over its facial recognition tool, which scans and tags people's photos on the platform. The tech firm will pay $550 million to a group of users in Illinois, who argued that its facial recognition tool violated the state's privacy laws.
The decision was made by the company amidst recent scrutiny over the use of facial recognition by the police and in public spaces. The decision to settle the case, which has been ongoing since 2015, was announced by Facebook in its quarterly earnings report.
In 2018, a federal judge ruled that the case against Facebook could be heard as a class action case and the company's attempts to stop it have been declined by both the appeals court and the Supreme Court.
Facebook said: "We decided to pursue a settlement as it was in the best interests of our community and our shareholders to move past this matter."
The facial recognition tool started being used by Facebook in 2010 when it automatically tagged people in photos using its tag suggestions tool. The tool scans a user's face and offered suggestions about who that person is.
It spurred controversy during that time because although users can turn the tool off, they were not explicitly asked if they had wanted it activated. The company renamed the setting as face recognition in 2017 and enabled people to more easily switch it on or off.
In 2019, the company decided to make the feature opt-in as part of initiatives to focus more on privacy.
Christopher Rossbach of investment bank J Stern & Co said: "This settlement represents the second major settlement from Facebook in six months. Protecting people's information and privacy has become a top priority for it and it has more than 1,000 engineers working on privacy-related projects."
