You must have heard about the video-sharing site named Vimeo. It is one of the websites where millions of people watch videos every day. While it is not as popular as YouTube or other websites, it is still quite popular. However, Vimeo is now facing trouble due to multiple lawsuits filed by people for storing their biometric data without even asking. According to the lawsuits, Vimeo stored users’ facial data without consent from the user. Also, the lawsuit says that Vimeo did not even tell them the duration in which they would save the data as well as how can a user make the company delete that data.
This lawsuit was filed against Vimeo in Illinois and it is filed on behalf of ‘potentially thousands of plaintiffs’. Now, you would be wondering right now about why would Vimeo want to store its users’ facial data. Well, the data was being collected for Magisto, an application: a short-form video creation platform purchased by Vimeo in April 2019. Apparently, Vimeo used that data inside Magisto to index the faces of people in videos so that face-tagging can be easier.
For anyone wondering, we also know that face-tagging is not a new concept at all. We know that Google does it with most of their apps and Facebook does it as well. However, Facebook is also facing a similar lawsuit for storing and using facial biometric data of its users without consent. On the part of Google, we believe that the company might be taking consent or might not be storing the facial data on its servers.
According to the lawsuit, Vimeo used the facial data from plaintiff such as “geometric data relating to the contours of his face and the distances between his eyes, nose, and ears” in order to create a unique template of his face.