The U.S. District Court in San Francisco will hear lawsuits against Facebook for allegedly violating the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act with its picture tagging feature, Bloomberg Technology reports. Google faces similar suits in Chicago. "A loss by the companies could lead to new restrictions on using biometrics in the U.S., similar to those in Europe and Canada," the report states. While Facebook argues that the case holds no merit as users have not been able to demonstrate concrete harm, as necessitated by the Spokeo precedent, others say not so fast. “Biometric identifiers are a key way to link together information about people,” said the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Marc Rotenberg. That information extends to "discrete financial, medical and educational records," the report adds.
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