FACEBOOK users in Illinois may be getting even more money from Meta following a lawsuit.
More than a million Facebook users in Illinois are due to get money from a $650million Facebook settlement, Chicago Business reported.
In 2022, the social media giant dished out $550million, or $397 to 1.38million of Facebook users in Illinois.
Now, those same Facebook users may be entitled to another $30.61.
This money comes from the nearly 110,000 claimants who didn’t cash their checks, which equates to around $43 million.
“All the money goes to the claiming class members, but sometimes people don’t cash the checks,” Chicago attorney Jay Edelson, told The Chicago Tribune.
“So there are distributions later on,” Edelson, who brought the lawsuit against Facebook eight years ago, added.
The lawsuit claimed that Meta violated Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act.
More specifically, Facebook users’ data was allegedly collected and stored without the proper notice and consent required by Illinois law.
The lawsuit cited Facebook’s “Tag Suggestions” feature and others that used facial recognition technology.
Although Facebook has denied it violated the law, it agreed on a settlement to avoid further legal complications.
“We’ve always thought that this settlement was, in many ways, a model settlement for class actions,” Edelson said.
“This distribution check is larger than a lot of people get in class actions.”
It will take Facebook about two weeks to finish sending out checks and processing the electronic payments, Chicago Business said.
In 2008, Illinois passed the Biometric Information Privacy Act, which is one of the strictest in the country.
It requires companies to get permission before using biometric technologies like facial recognition and fingerprint scans to identify people.
The payments will only be sent to users who filed a claim before November 2020.
— to www.the-sun.com
