Facebook settles facial recognition dispute

Facebook has settled a long-running legal dispute about the way it scans and tags people's photos. It will pay $550m (£421m) to a group of users in Illinois, who argued that its facial recognition tool was in violation of the state's privacy laws. The case has been ongoing since 2015, and the settlement was announced in its quarterly earnings. It comes as facial recognition use by the police, and in public spaces, comes under intense scrutiny. The lawsuit against Facebook was given the go-ahead in 2018 when a federal judge ruled it could be heard as a class action (group) case.