Facebook (FB) subsidiary Instagram has been hit by a $500 billion class action lawsuit for illegally harvesting biometrics data and storing it on its servers without the consent of its 100 million Insta users. The lawsuit filed in the state court of California alleges that the photo sharing platform used a photo-tagging tool to store Facial Recognition (FR) data on its servers.
“All these claims are baseless as Instagram doesn’t use any FR technology. And the legal department of Facebook knows how to deal with such class action suits very well”, added Stephanie Otway, a spokesperson.
Note 1- FB disclosed to the media in July 2020 that it was ready to pay $650 million for a lawsuit accusing the company of illegally collecting user data. The social media giant admitted that it was collecting Facial recognition data to enhance the functionalities of its products. Perhaps, that might trigger the filing of the latest class action lawsuit.
Note 2- In Jan’2020 Instagram announced that it is collecting biometric data of its users since 9 months. So, there is a high probability that the legal system of United States can make Instagram pay $1k to $5k per violation that could account to $500 billion on a whole.
Note 3- Founded in 2010, the company claims to have 1 billion registered users till May 2019- an increase of 10 million per year. In April 2012, Facebook gained Instagram after the former decided to pay $1billion in cash as the photo and video sharing platform became popular among mobile users across the world- especially those using iOS devices. At the end of the year 2019, the company announced that it reached a milestone of becoming the 4th, most downloaded mobile app for the year.
