A group of parents and their children from Illinois and California has initiated a lawsuit against Meta, claiming that the company unlawfully utilized their Facebook and Instagram photos to train its AI image-generation models and to develop the unreleased “NameTag” face-recognition feature for smart glasses.
The federal class action suit, filed in Chicago, argues that Meta extracted users’ biometric information without their consent, violating privacy laws in Illinois and California. The plaintiffs point to previous reports indicating that Meta employees claimed NameTag could recognize individuals based on their Meta connections or public Instagram profiles. Additionally, a patent by Meta suggests face matching against images held by the company, further substantiating the lawsuit’s claims.
Reports from June indicated that NameTag’s code was hidden within the Meta glasses AI companion app, which has over 50 million downloads. Although the feature hadn’t been enabled, it was built to convert faces into biometric signatures for comparison with pre-existing photo databases. However, the origins of the faceprint data remain undisclosed.
The lawsuit also addresses Meta’s AI systems, stating that generative models like Emu and Muse Image were trained using extensive amounts of user data from Facebook and Instagram. Some features of Muse Image that allowed creating images based on public Instagram accounts faced backlash and were removed shortly after launch due to privacy concerns.
A Meta spokesperson stated that the lawsuit lacks merit and mischaracterizes the company’s operations. They emphasized transparency in using user information for AI development and mentioned that NameTag was still in the exploratory phase.
In this case, the plaintiffs include Francisco Alvarez and his son, along with Jeremy Wahl and his daughter, expanding to potentially millions of affected individuals whose images have been incorporated into Meta’s systems since September 2021. They are seeking substantial damages under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, including $5,000 for willful violations.
This isn’t the first instance where Meta’s handling of biometric data has come under scrutiny. The company previously settled for $650 million related to face-recognition practices and has faced other allegations concerning biometric data collection.
Following the previous reports on NameTag, Meta swiftly removed the embedded code, stating the feature was non-existent for consumers despite evidence to the contrary. Meta’s Chief Technology Officer criticized the reporting as misleading yet later acknowledged that NameTag had potential as a memory feature for recognizing acquaintances.
The lawsuit illustrates a broader pattern of privacy violations attributed to Meta, tracing back to its early days, including controversial comments from CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarding user trust.
