Does Flickr Have Facial Recognition?

As technology advances, more and more people are concerned about facial recognition databases and the possibility that this data could be used in sinister ways, but the average person may be unaware of when their data is being pulled into a database to be used for facial recognition program training.

What is Facial Recognition?

Essentially, facial recognition technology uses computer programs to analyze photos of human faces in order to identify exactly who they are. These systems can then be used for surveillance purposes. One of the major concerns that people have about facial recognition technology is that it can be used very passively, without the knowledge or the permission of the person being surveilled.

Now, it’s everywhere—airports use it to identify you before a flight, phones use this technology as a biometric unlocking mechanism, and it’s also widely used on Facebook to tag photos of your friends. Other apps with photo albums use this tech to compile albums with the same groups of people. Advertisers use this technology to gather data on consumers, too.

Some countries have begun using this technology for tracking citizens, searching for people of interest, and racial profiling.

Why Has Facial Recognition Technology Spread So Quickly?

In the last several years, a number of major websites have created significant pools of data for this technology to make use of—together, Flickr, Instagram, Google, Facebook, and other sites across the internet host billions of photos of human faces, which have been used to create extremely large datasets that can then be used to train the neural networks of artificial intelligence systems.

Does Flickr Use Facial Recognition?

Flickr has an image recognition algorithm that suggests possible tags for photos to users, which it says is based on image patterns and is not the same as facial recognition.

However, just because Flickr itself doesn’t use facial recognition doesn’t mean that Flickr isn’t used to provide data for outside systems. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of human portraits have been uploaded to the facial recognition database MegaFace, which has so far been downloaded by dozens of different companies.

Americans are not protected from this kind of technology under federal law, but certain states have much stricter regulations on privacy issues, including biometric information.

For instance, in Illinois, the Biometric Information Privacy Act was passed back in 2008 that includes financial penalties for anyone who uses the fingerprints or face scans of an Illinois resident without their consent. However, major companies who have used the MegaFace database have been functioning as if they were unaware that this law exists.

Images of children who are 13 years old or younger may also be protected by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Can I File a Lawsuit Over Facial Recognition Issues?

So far, more than 200 class action lawsuits over the misuse of Illinois residents’ biometric information have been filed since 2015. One of these lawsuits is a $35 billion case against Facebook for the facial recognition tech it uses to tag people in the photos uploaded to the site. The company tried to argue that people did not suffer “concrete harm,” but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected this argument.

If you uploaded images onto your Flickr account, you may be able to join this Flickr facial recognition class action lawsuit investigation.

Join a Free Flickr Facial Recognition Class Action Lawsuit Investigation

If you had a Flickr account and you uploaded pictures onto that account, those images may have been given to MegaFace and used for facial recognition purposes without your permission, and you may qualify to join this Flickr facial recognition class action lawsuit investigation.

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This article is not legal advice. It is presented
for informational purposes only.