Facebook announced Thursday that it has reached an out-of-court settlement that will pay 550 million dollars to a group of users in Illinois for using their biometric data without permission. He did the day after presenting a disappointing quarterly results that caused a sharp drop in their titles, exceeding 6%. In a single day, the tech giant has left 50,000 million dollars in market capitalization.

The agreement is the end of a dispute that has lasted for five years and once again calls into question Facebook's practices regarding the privacy of its millions of users. In 2018, the illicit use of data of members of the social network by the Cambridge Analytica firm for political purposes caused a collapse of their titles.

In this case, the company founded by Mark Zuckerberg was accused in a 2015 class action lawsuit of using and storing biometric data, such as fingerprints or facial expression, without users' consent to later identify specific people in other images and give the possibility for the user to label with the person's name.

It is a common option and that Facebook continues to offer its users, although now it is easier to deactivate it. "Biometric data is one of the two main battlefields, along with geolocation, which will define our privacy rights for the next generation," said Jay Edelson , the plaintiffs' lawyer. "We hope other companies will follow the example of Facebook and pay close attention to the importance of our biometric information. "

The demand encompasses thousands of users, who could receive about $ 200 per head . Nimesh Paterl, Adam Pezen and Carlo Licata took the initiative to file the lawsuit against Facebook in May 2015.

The agreement did not help alleviate the decline in their titles after quarterly results below expectations by Wall Street analysts. Facebook reported a 51% increase in its expenses compared to 2018 - most of it in terms of privacy - and a decrease in its operating margins from 45% to 34%.

The social network based in Menlo Park also recognized that the contribution of its other applications, Instagram, Messenger and Whatsapp , is still tiny compared to the income of Facebook, the jewel in the crown. Of course, all of them contribute to the daily average of users is 2,500 million people .

Zuckerberg, however, is optimistic and is clear on how to achieve greater long-term growth. "It will take time, but in the next decade I want us to build a reputation for privacy that is as strong as our reputation around building good and stable services," he said in a statement. There does not seem to be another way out.

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