Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, all have been accused of violating Illinois state laws that prohibit the use of personal biometric data without permission. Two residents in the state allege that images of their faces appeared on IBM’s “Diversity in Faces” database without their consent and were used to train facial recognition systems at the companies, violating the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The suit seeks class-action status on behalf of “all other similarly situated individuals” in Illinois. In a recent similar case, Facebook paid $550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit stemming from BIPA.
