Apple's Photos app has been automatically scanning every face in your photo library since 2016, no consent, no toggle to turn it off, not just for you but for anyone who appears in your pictures, including minors. A federal judge already certified this as a class action covering 6.5 million Illinois residents, and damages could theoretically reach $32.5 billion.
Apple's defense is that the data gets encrypted after it leaves your device, so they claim it's not a stored "biometric identifier," and that not even they can read it. I'm not buying that completely. Companies don't build features like this, with zero opt out and zero toggle, out of pure generosity. If there was truly nothing in it for them, there'd be an off switch. Call me skeptical, but "we can't see it" is a hell of a convenient thing to say about data you built the entire pipeline for.
Facebook paid $650 million and Google paid $100 million for doing this exact thing to their users. That's not a coincidence, that's a pattern.
🔗 https://www.mlex.com/mlex/data-privacy-security/articles/2518846
#Apple #Privacy #BIPA #ConsumerRights #FacialRecognition
