Another social media company is paying up due to Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act. Snap Inc. (the parent company of Snapchat) has reached a $35 million settlement in an Illinois class action lawsuit over its use of facial recognition technology. The lawsuit alleges that Snapchat violated the BIPA law by collecting and storing the biometric data of users who used its lenses and filters -- without their consent. Illinois residents who resided in the state after November 17th, 2015 and used Snapchat's popular AR features may be eligible for a cut of the settlement. Snap Inc. is only the latest company to get penalized under BIPA -- which requires companies to ask for consent before it can collect biometric data from users.

More than a million Illinois residents will receive a $397 settlement payment from Facebook this week, thanks to a legal battle over the platform's since-retired photo-tagging system that used facial recognition. It's been nearly seven years since the 2015 class-action lawsuit was first filed, which accused Facebook of breaking a state privacy law that forbids companies from collecting biometric data without informing users. The platform has since faced broad, global criticism for its use of facial recognition tech, and last year Meta halted the practice completely on Facebook and Instagram. But as Vox notes, the company has made no promises to avoid facial recognition in future products. Even though it was first filed in Illinois, the class-action lawsuit eventually wound up on Facebook's home turf -- at the U.S. District Court for Northern California.

Facebook allegedly violated Illinois state law by using consumers' facial features to improve its photo-tagging software. Nearly one and a half million Illinois residents have filed claims to part of a $650 million privacy settlement offered by Facebook. According to NBC Chicago, the law firm responsible for the social media lawsuit said that 1.42 million Illinois residents have already filed claims. Eligible claimants could receive awards ranging between $200 and $400. The lawsuit, says NBC, alleged that Facebook broke Illinois' "strict biometric privacy law."

The secretive startup was exposed last week in an explosive New York Times report which revealed how Clearview was selling access to "faceprints" and facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies across the US. The startup claimed it could identify a person based on a single photo, revealing their real name, general location, and other identifiers. The report sparked outrage among US citizens, who had photos collected and added to the Clearview AI database without their consent. The Times reported that the company collected more than three billion photos, from sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Venmo, and others. This week, the company was hit with the first lawsuit in the aftermath of the New York Times exposé.

The question of whether you should let Facebook save your face is gaining in urgency as Facebook makes moves to expand its deployment of facial recognition. It faces a lawsuit by Illinois residents over the technology. SAN FRANCISCO -- Of all the information Facebook collects about you, nothing is more personal than your face. With 2.2 billion users uploading hundreds of millions of photos a day, the giant social network has developed one of the single-largest databases of faces and -- with so many images to train its facial recognition software -- one of the most accurate. The question of whether you should let Facebook save your face is gaining in urgency as it moves to expand its deployment of facial recognition, rolling it out in Europe, where it was scrapped in 2012 over privacy concerns and scanning and identifying more people in photos. At the same time, the giant social network is attempting to quash efforts to restrict the use of facial recognitionin the U.S., from legislation to litigation.