Class action suits which have been raised against a Facebook facial recognition tool have been transferred from Chicago's federal courts to San Francisco's.The move follows US District Judge James B. Zagel's decision to accept a request from Facebook, and supported by attorneys for the plaintiffs, to move cases from earlier this year in Illinois to the northern district of California.In April, plaintiff Carlo Licata claimed in a suit that Facebook's tag feature is in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), he was soon followed by the plaintiffs Adam Pezen and Nimesh Patel.All say that the social media giant had not obtained written consent for this facial data used in the tag feature, or failed to inform their users how long this particular information would be stored or used.Developed by Face.com, a company Facebook acquired, the tagging system uses facial recognition technology to recognize people in photos posted by users.Licata's complaint, for instance, alleges the company was “calculatedly elusive” in introducing the system to its users, and did not offer a release from users authorizing the collection of their “faceprints,” or a readily available policy describing how Facebook will retain or potentially destroy users' biometric data.Plaintiffs have asked the judge to create a class of users, which could number in the millions, and award damages of $5,000 per violation.

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