The benefits of internet privacy laws can sometimes be hard to grasp: With the right regulations, users can sometimes have a vague reassurance that advertisers or the government can’t snoop as easily on their personal information.
But this week, residents of Illinois have been getting a more tangible benefit: $397.
The money has been arriving by check and direct deposit from a settlement fund set up last year after Facebook agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the social media company had violated the rights of Illinois residents by collecting and storing digital scans of their faces without permission.
The money is headed only to Illinois because of the state’s pioneering Biometric Information Privacy Act, an unusual law passed in 2008 that allows consumers in the state to sue companies for privacy violations involving fingerprints, retina scans, facial geometry and similar data. The state has generally been regarded as among the most aggressive places in the world in terms of regulations on tech.
For some people in Illinois, it’s the clearest example they’ve seen of a privacy law working.
“It says something interesting about the law that we have here in Illinois, that it actually has some teeth in it, and that they were able to really get Facebook to own up to having done something wrong,” said Eric Allix Rogers, 36, who lives in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood and runs events and communications for a nonprofit organization.
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