That is not my settlement. I do not live in the Lone Star (by average reviews out of five) state.

I'm Illinoisan, where Google illegally used facial recognition on people without their consent. And lines in a ToS about doing whatever they want with your data is not consent, especially because it isn't optional.

Note that settlements do not mean they didn't do something illegal: It means they did something illegal, but are agreeing to pay out money in exchange for not having to admit they did something illegal.

And yes, I've worked to minimize Google's access to my data since 2014. Unfortunately, they seem to like trying to get it from other sources. As mentioned in the article, they've appropriated personal medical data from hospitals without patient consent multiple times.

This one? https://www.googlebipasettlement.com/ No, you can't assume a settlement means guilt. In this case, Google likely decided that it wasn't worth fighting, cheaper to pay the fine. Google's change is to allow people to opt-out (not opt-in) while keeping the face grouping feature.

I don't really think much of these cases.

I mean, I would agree the law could be stronger here. My face data primarily resides on other people's accounts. It's illegal for Google to have that under BIPA without my consent, but it looks like the settlement is allowing them to continue doing that without my consent (or even agreement to their ToS).

The case may be poor, but only in the reason that it fails to actually force Google to comply with the law going forward. Facebook was more successfully forced to shut down their facial recognition technology and delete all of the data: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/02/facebook-face-recognition-...