Meta sued in the US over use of photos for AI glasses
In the United States, a group of parents and their children from Illinois and California has filed a lawsuit against Meta. The plaintiffs allege that the company used photos from Facebook and Instagram without users’ consent for NameTag, a facial recognition system intended for Meta’s AI glasses.
As NDTV World reports, the 66-page complaint was filed last week in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The lawsuit also alleges that photos were used without users’ consent to train the Emu and Muse Image generative AI models.
Claims regarding NameTag
According to the plaintiffs, NameTag could collect facial images from user content on Meta’s platforms, create biometric identifiers based on them, and store them on the company’s servers. According to the complaint, this data could subsequently be transferred to NameTag to identify people captured by Meta glasses.
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WIRED reported the existence of NameTag in June: inactive code for the system was discovered in the Meta AI app. Analysts concluded at the time that it could turn faces captured by the glasses into biometric templates and compare them with other templates on the user’s phone.
The company’s position
A Meta spokesperson, commenting to WIRED, dismissed the lawsuit, saying that it misrepresents the company’s work. According to the spokesperson, NameTag was not provided to consumers, and no final decision had been made regarding the system’s further use.
The proposed class of plaintiffs includes people in Illinois, California, and other US states who uploaded images to Meta’s platforms or provided data to its generative AI systems since September 2021. The complaint states that the number of potential participants in the lawsuit could exceed millions of people.
