Seattle judge allows data privacy suits against Microsoft, Amazon to proceed

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

A Seattle federal judge said this week that twin suits against Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp over allegedly illegal use of photos used to develop facial recognition software can go forward.

Both Amazon and Microsoft, which have joined forces to battle the suits, had tried to get the complaints thrown out. But on Wednesday Judge James L. Robart ruled in a Seattle federal court that the cases have enough merit to proceed.

Steven Vance and Tim Janecyk, both Illinois residents, sued Amazon and Microsoft last year after their photos were included in datasets used by both companies to develop facial recognition products, according to the complaint.

The men’s photos made their way to most major tech companies after the men had, years before, uploaded their photos to Flickr, an online photo-sharing platform.

https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2021/04/16/seattle-judge-privacy-suits-amzn-msft.html

[crickets]

1. Interesting, and something to keep an eye on.

Article with no paywall:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/facial-recognition-lawsuits-against-amazon-and-microsoft-can-proceed-judge-rules/

Illinois residents Steven Vance and Tim Janecyk uploaded images of themselves to the photo-sharing website Flickr in the mid-2000s. Without their knowledge, IBM included their faces in a data set of 1 million images, called Diversity in Faces, intended to help train facial-recognition algorithms to better distinguish between people of color — something facial recognition tools are notoriously bad at doing. A string of incidents in which facial recognition algorithms resulted in wrongful arrests have generated allegations that the software’s implicit racial bias violates civil rights.

Microsoft and Amazon both used the Diversity in Faces data set to improve the accuracy of their facial recognition software. In doing so, the companies violated a 2008 Illinois statute, the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), prohibiting companies from profiting off individuals’ biometric data, Vance and Janecyk contended in their suit, which is seeking class-action status. The plaintiffs also lodged a complaint of unjust enrichment against the firms, arguing that Amazon and Microsoft did not obtain their consent to use their images to develop software.

There's more nuance to this than can be covered in 2-4 paragraphs. The entire article is worth a read.