Amazon Hit with Class Action Over Alleged Use of Ill. Residents’ Facial Scans to Improve, Market Rekognition Tech

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Amazon faces a proposed class action in Illinois over its allegedly secret use of state residents’ facial scans and other biometric identifiers to improve Rekognition, image-recognition technology that the world’s largest online retailer markets and sells to businesses, governmental entities and others. 

The 43-page lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court alleges Amazon.com, Inc. has scanned the facial geometries of “every person” who appears in images uploaded to its cloud-based Amazon Photos (formerly Amazon Prime Photos) product “regardless of whether that person is a Prime member or someone who has no idea that a photo of them has been uploaded to the platform.” 

Troublingly, the suit says, Amazon uses the data it gleans from Amazon Photos facial scans to make its Rekognition product “more valuable and attractive to its clients,” thereby increasing profits at the expense of the privacy rights that the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) was enacted to protect, the complaint contends. Per the case, roughly 5.8 million Amazon Prime subscribers live in Illinois. 

The suit, filed on behalf of a minor plaintiff, alleges Amazon “has violated, and continues to violate,” the Illinois BIPA. According to the case, the defendant has failed to establish a publicly available policy that outlines a retention schedule and guidelines for the permanent destruction of Illinois residents’ biometric data as required by the state’s BIPA. Moreover, Amazon has obtained residents’ facial scans without first providing adequate written notice or obtaining informed written consent from those who appear in photos uploaded to the platform, the lawsuit claims.

Overall, the money Amazon has made through the use of Illinois residents’ facial geometries amounts to a violation of the biometric information privacy law, the lawsuit alleges. 

According to the suit, image recognition was touted in 2014, the year Amazon launched Amazon Photos, as “the tech world’s ‘next big thing’” in part due to the advances of “deep learning,” or the building of deep neural networks that simulate the mechanism of the human brain to interpret and analyze data. At the time, Amazon, however, “lagged slightly behind” Facebook, Apple and Google in the deep-learning arena, and the company, aiming to quickly catch up, acquired in 2015 deep-learning startup Orbeus to help develop its image-recognition capabilities for Amazon Photos, the case relays. 

Amazon launched Rekognition, an updated version of Orbeus’s ReKognition deep-learning interface, in 2017, the suit says. Although the defendant acknowledged at the time that it had been using Rekognition within its Prime Photo service, Amazon did not disclose to the public that the technology was “trained by analyzing the billions of images uploaded daily” onto the platform, the lawsuit asserts, noting the product’s appeal to certain third parties: 

“In other words, the biometric identifiers— scans of facial geometry— of untold millions of people were obtained, stored, and analyzed by Amazon’s Rekognition from the billions of images uploaded to Amazon Photos daily. The ability to ‘learn’ from all of the images stored in Amazon Photos accounts made Rekognition more accurate. This, in turn, made Rekognition more valuable to Amazon’s business, governmental, and organizational customers, enabling Amazon to profit from the biometric identifiers and information of not only millions of Prime customers but also millions of non-Prime customers whose images were uploaded to Amazon Photos, often without their knowledge or consent.” 

The suit goes on to note that although the image-recognition features in Amazon Photos are not automatically enabled for Prime members who are Illinois residents, the app prompts residents to enable the feature, which can be done easily with one tap. According to the lawsuit, Amazon knows that “very few—if any—account holders go through the trouble of confirming that every friend, family member, or other person who is in their photos provides the informed consent that is necessary for Amazon to collect their biometric identifiers and information.” 

The case looks to represent all Illinois residents who, while residing in the state, had their biometric identifiers, including scans of facial geometry and related biometric information, collected, captured, received or otherwise obtained by Amazon from photographs uploaded to another person’s Amazon Photos account.

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