Google Photos sued by the state of Illinois in a $100 million class-action face-scanning lawsuit

According to Gizmodo, a class-action lawsuit of $100 million was filed against Google Photos for allegedly breaking the state of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. Basically, the act says that any company collecting user data of the state’s inhabitants must offer a publicly available and written policy stating when it’s collecting voice, fingerprint, hand, retina, iris, or face biometric scans and how long it will keep it before destroying it. Google didn’t exactly do this.

Google has a feature called face grouping where it tries to use your facial geometry to find similar faces to ask “Is this the same person?” You’ve likely seen this before, but guess what – anyone who appeared in the background of your picture, like a friend or family member (that photobombing finally pays off, huh?) may not realize that their face was also captured and stored in Google’s servers. It’s also very likely that these individuals aren’t Google Photos users!

The plaintiffs in the filing state that:

“Google is actively collecting, storing, and using—without providing notice, obtaining informed written consent or publishing data retention policies—the biometrics of millions of unwitting individuals whose faces appear in photographs uploaded to Google Photos in Illinois. Specifically, Google has created, collected and stored, in conjunction with its cloud-based ‘Google Photos’ service, millions of ‘face templates’ (or ‘face models’)—highly detailed geometric maps of the face—from millions of Google Photos users.”

This would also apply to anyone who has disabled or not initially agreed to face grouping while setting up Google Photos as not everyone trusts Google with everything (go figure). If you fall into either category and live in the state of Illinois, you may be eligible for between $200 and $400 USD (depending on how many people file a claim) if a picture of you showed up in the Google Photos app between May 1, 2015, and April 25, 2022. You can mail in a claim using the form found on the settlement’s website.

As a result of this little mishap, Google Photos now has a new face grouping retention policy for user data that states that deleting individual photos and videos or toggling off face grouping entirely will destroy your face data (not the real thing, just the copy). Additionally, if your account is inactive for more than two years, the face grouping content will also be purged.