$650M facial recognition settlement approved against Facebook

A federal judge in San Francisco signed off Friday on a $650 million deal to resolve a class action against Facebook for abusing facial recognition technology.

He also approved $97.5 million in attorney fees for the plaintiffs' attorneys.

"Overall, the settlement is a major win for consumers in the hotly contested area of digital privacy," wrote U.S. District Judge James Donato.

The settlement will provide at least $345 to more than 1.5 million class members who have filed claims. It's among the largest settlements ever for a privacy violation. In re: Facebook Biometric Information Privacy Litigation, 15-cv-03747 (N.D. Cal., filed Aug. 17, 2015).

Final approval of the lawsuit comes five years after plaintiffs sued Facebook for mapping users' faces for its "photo tag suggest" feature. Donato initially balked at a $550 million settlement, questioning why plaintiffs accepted such a steep discount on $47 billion in potential damages if they went to trial.

Donato was among the first federal judges to determine that a privacy injury is sufficient to establish standing to sue under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act of 2008. The Illinois Supreme Court and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have concluded the same.

"The standing issue makes this settlement all the more valuable because Facebook and other big tech companies continue to fight the proposition that a statutory privacy violation is a genuine harm," he wrote.

The Illinois law, which requires companies to get permission from people if they want to use facial recognition technology on them, carries penalties of $1,000 for each negligent violation and $5,000 for each knowing violation.

The settlement ensures that no face templates will be created or retained by Facebook for users in Illinois unless they choose to turn the feature on after being notified about how it uses the data.