Crucial biometric privacy law survives Illinois court fight
Privacy advocates won a crucial court victory on Friday, as the Illinois Supreme Court dismissed a case that would have pared back a state law limiting the use of facial recognition and other biometrics.
Passed in 2008, Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (or BIPA) requires affirmative consent for companies to collect biometric markers from their customers, including fingerprints and facial recognition models. The law has become a sticking point for a number of tech companies using facial recognition as a photo-sorting tool, and both Facebook and Google have faced lawsuits for alleged BIPA violations in their photo-tagging products. Facebook has pushed for legislative revisions to the law on several occasions, but so far...