Facial-recognition database may have violated Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act

The New York Times reports on a large facial-recognition database, MegaFace, containing the likenesses of hundreds of thousands of individuals including children, uploaded over the years on Flickr. Developed without the consent of most individuals on the pictures, this dataset has been used by more than 100 organisations, including Google, Amazon, Tencent and SenseTime. MegaFace does not contain people’s names, but its data is not anonymized and remains publicly available for download. After Illinois passed in 2008 a law protecting the “biometric identifiers and biometric information” of its residents, Faye Jones, law professor at the university of Illinois argues this database directly violates Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act.