Surveillance Society: Who has the rights to your face?; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 7/13/15

Rich Lord, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Surveillance Society: Who has the rights to your face? :

"Facebook’s handling of your headshot is now the subject of class action lawsuits that pose the question: When someone turns your mug into data, are those digits theirs or yours?

Filed in April and May, the lawsuits claim that when Facebook started converting the geometry of your profile picture into what it calls “a unique number,” it broke a 2008 Illinois law giving residents certain rights when their biometric information is collected.

Facebook is disputing the claims, and fired its first legal salvos this month. That developing legal fight, plus the meltdown last month of a government effort to come up with standards for the use of facial recognition technology, suggests that the distances between your eyes, nose and mouth are hot battlegrounds in the privacy wars."