Facebook Heads to Trial Over Collecting Biometrics of Nonusers

Facebook Inc. faces a trial over whether it collects and uses the biometric information of Illinois citizens without Facebook accounts, a federal judge in California ruled, but he trimmed the scope of the suit.

Clayton Zellmer sued on behalf of a putative class of Illinois citizens without Facebook accounts, alleging that Facebook’s photo-tagging tool, which looks for and identifies people’s faces in photographs uploaded to the social media site, violates Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act.

Facebook contends that it doesn’t even possess biometric information of nonusers, because it deletes face signatures if it determines that there isn’t a match to ...