Civil Plaintiff
Google Photos Face Grouping Has a New Retention Policy Due to a $100 Million Lawsuit
Face Grouping in Google Photos has been around for several years at this point. It uses the facial features of a user’s face to recognize that face within a photo and group any pictures or videos that include that person into a single digital bucket. The technology even works for pets, as pictured below.
While that’s genuinely useful, the plaintiff in this case argued that the behavior broke the Illinois law. That law requires any private company collecting biometric data – including a face scan – to have a public policy on how long that data is held by the company, and how that data is destroyed. In Google’s case, the problem was that Google wasn’t informing users that biometric data – the photo of their face – was being collected.
