A new lawsuit is accusing Facebook of violating privacy with photo face-tagging software

San Francisco (AFP) - A US judge rejected a request by Facebook to toss out a civil suit accusing it of violating privacy with face-recognition software to help "tag" people in pictures. A lawsuit filed by three Illinois residents under the auspices of the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act can proceed, US District Court Judge James Donato said. "The court accepts as true plaintiffs' allegations that Facebook's face recognition technology involves a scan of face geometry that was done without plaintiffs' consent," he said in the ruling. It appeared that legislators in Illinois passed the act to address emerging biometric technology such as Facebook face-recognition software at issue in the case, according to the judge. Facebook had argued in a motion to dismiss that analyzing uploaded photographs did not qualify as biometric data and that the Illinois law did not apply.