Instagram is illegally collecting biometric data, claims new lawsuit

Nithin Chowdary

August 12, 2020

Facebook is facing another lawsuit that mentions that Facebook reportedly did not ask for user permission to collect biometric data and has been collecting since the start of 2020 through its photo-tagging feature of Instagram. Bloomberg mentioned in its report that "Facebook is accused of collecting, storing and profiting from the biometric data of more than 100 million Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent."Last month Facebook offered to pay a $650 million settlement facing a similar lawsuit. As per the Illinois privacy law, Now Facebook may be forced to pay "$1000 per violation or $5,000 if it's found to have acted recklessly or intentionally".Recently Apple iOS14 beta users also reported that they got a privacy scare when they found out that Instagram was secretly using the camera in the background. Still, Instagram blamed this issue on a bug. At the same time, one of Facebook's secret security tools called 'Pysa' for fixing bugs on Instagram has been open-sourced. According to the company, Pysa detected 44% of all bugs in the server-side Python code of Instagram this year.

Abridged fromET CISO