Is that Maria Callas? Check with Facebook — they’ll know.
I blogged last year about privacy concerns surrounding Facebook’s “face geometry” database activities, which have led to lawsuits in Illinois under the premise that those activities run afoul of that state’s laws regarding the use of biometric data.
The Illinois legislation, enacted in 2008, requires companies to obtain written authorization from subjects prior to collecting any sort of face geometry or related biometric data.
The lawsuit, which was filed in early 2015, centers on Facebook’s automatic photo-tagging feature which has been active since around 2010. The “faceprints” feature – Facebook’s term for face geometry – recognizes faces based on the social network’s vast archive of users and their content, and suggests their names when they appear in photos uploaded by their friends.
The lawsuit was filed by three plaintiffs in a potential class-action effort, and it’s been mired in legal wrangling ever since.
From the outset, many had predicted that Facebook would emerge victorious. Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, noted in 2015 that the Illinois law is “a niche statute, enacted to solve a particular problem. Seven years later, it’s being applied to a very different set of circumstances.”
But this past week, a federal judge sided not with Facebook, but with the plaintiffs by refusing to grant a request for dismissal.
In his ruling issued on May 5th, U.S. District Court Judge James Donato rejected Facebook’s contention that the Illinois Biometric Privacy Information Act does not apply to faceprints that are derived from photos, but only when it’s based on a source other than photos, such as in-person scans.
The Judge roundly rejected this contention as inconsistent with the purpose of the Illinois law. Donato wrote:
“The statute is an informed consent privacy law addressing the collection, retention and use of personal biometric identifiers and information at a time when biometric technology is just beginning to be broadly deployed. Trying to cabin this purpose within a specific in-person data collection technique has no support in the words and structure of the statute, and is antithetical to its broad purpose of protecting privacy in the face of emerging biometric technology.”
This isn’t the first time that the Illinois law has withstood a legal challenge. Another federal court judge, Charles Norgle, sided against Shutterfly recently on the same issues.
And Google is now in the crosshairs; it’s facing a class-action lawsuit filed early this year for its face geometry activities involving Google Photos.
Clearly, this fight has a long way to go before the issues are resolved.
If you have strong opinions pro or con about social networks’ use of face geometry, please share your views with other readers in the comment section below.
I’ve blogged before about the city of Detroit, surely our country’s “Exhibit A” when it comes to chronicling urban decline.
The saga of Detroit’s recent history is pretty widely known, thanks to a bevy of articles in news magazines, lurid photo essays by prominent “ruin porn” photographers like Camilo José Vergara, and books by author Ze’ev Chafets and others.
But the most recent volume, Detroit: An American Autopsy, authored by journalist and reporter Charlie LeDuff and released earlier this year, is perhaps the most impactful of these — which makes it required reading.
That’s because not only is this book the most contemporary one on the subject – with up-to-the-minute references to the city’s most recent governmental follies – but also because the author happens to be a Detroit native.
In my view, Charlie LeDuff is one of the most fascinating reporters in the news industry today, with a background that is hardly common for journalists.
Prior to joining the staff at the Detroit News in 2008, LeDuff’s reporting career included more than a decade at the New York Times, along with a stint as a writer for an Alaskan trade publication. His reporting has taken him all over the country and the world, including the war theater in Iraq.
So LeDuff approaches his topic with all the insights of a seasoned reporter – yet he is not the dispassionate observer. After all, Detroit is his hometown. And throughout the pages of the book, you can distinctly feel the anger, the despair, and the grief the author feels about his city.
Indeed, the saga of Detroit “hits home” in many personal ways for Charlie LeDuff. Consider these points:
Witnessing the 1967 race rioting mere blocks from their family home in West Detroit, LeDuff’s parents, like so many other middle-class residents, choose safety for their children, moving out of the city in a matter of days following.
LeDuff’s mother’s florist shop, located on Jefferson Boulevard on the east side of town, is broken into multiple times – with a final act of vandalism forcing her to move to a suburban location. (The site of her former shop is now a pile of rubble.)
Battling chemical dependency, LeDuff’s only sister is sucked into a life on the streets, becoming a prostitute and dying one evening while leaving a dive bar on the city’s far west side.
LeDuff’s three brothers become casualties of Michigan’s worsening business climate, bouncing from one dead-end job to the next – each one a step lower on the economic ladder as meaningful employment for high school-educated workers dries up.
LeDuff’s niece, barely 20 years old, dies from a heroin overdose.
The author may have been drawn back to Detroit because of the pull of family. But what he discovers is an urban environment that has a corrosive effect on all who come into contact with it. Although he moves his wife and young daughter to a suburban enclave just outside the city limits, LeDuff finds that no one is immune to its negative effects.
In the pages of his book, LeDuff reports on the unscrupulousness and/or incompetence of entire classes of Detroiters: politicians, government bureaucrats, street hustlers, business leaders (the car company executives come in for particular opprobrium) – and even the artist community.
But the author is also quick to point out that most Detroiters are simply attempting to survive in an urban environment that is so dysfunctional, so stress-inducing, that civil behavior is nearly impossible to practice.
During his time at the Detroit News, Charlie LeDuff would pen many columns exposing the squalor and corruption he witnessed in his city. For that, he received many an irate phone message or e-mail missive lobbed his way, criticizing him for failing to spotlight the “good” attributes of Detroit.
In his book LeDuff has this to say to those people:
“[They] complained that I was focusing on the negative in a city with so much good. What about all the galleries and museums and music …? What about the good things?
It was a fair point. There are plenty of good people in Detroit. Tens of thousands of them … There are lawyers and doctors and auto executives with nice homes and good jobs and community elders trying to make things better, teachers who spend their own money on the classroom, people who mow lawns out of respect for the dead neighbor, parents who raise their children, ministers who help with funeral expenses.
But these things are not supposed to be news. These things are supposed to be normal. And when normal things become the news, the abnormal becomes the norm. And when that happens, you might as well put a fork in it.”
It’s a journalist’s duty to report the news, of course. But sometimes he or she can attempt to do more. I have no doubt that Charlie LeDuff felt a certain sense of “mission” when he returned to his hometown.
But traces of any significant progress are hard to find, five years on. After a string of corrupt mayors, Detroit elected the affable but ultimately unsuccessful ex-NBA player and businessman Dave Bing to the office.
LeDuff evokes this sense of “no hope left, writ small” as he describes the family scene at the burial of his 20-year-old niece:
“[I] looked up at the old people around the grave and considered the great turmoil of human history that they represented. My mother, her ties to the Native people of the Great Lakes and the drifting whiskered French settlers. My stepfather, whose people emigrated from the port of Danzig, the long-disputed city claimed by both the Germans the Poles, which ignited World War II. My niece’s other grandparents, hill folk who hailed from Appalachia and traced their heritage back to the Lowlands of Scotland and the warrior William Wallace.
People from all corners of the earth who came to Detroit to work in its factories and make it one of the most significant cities of history.
I looked up over the grave and surveyed the heaving sobs of my nieces and the strained faces of my brothers. Jimmy looking for work. Frankie on the verge of losing his house. Billy in the screw factory. Somehow, the city of promise had become a scrap yard of dreams.”
Yet then … LeDuff adds this glimmer of light:
“But fighters do what they do best when they’ve been staggered. They get off their knees and they fight some more.”
The question is, how much longer can Detroit go on fighting?
Nones Notes 