A federal judge from the Northern District Court of Illinois approved TikTok’s $92 million settlement from a 2019 class action suit.

TikTok users alleged that TikTok had violated the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act that prohibits companies from disclosing information about the videos people watch. This was based on allegations that TikTok was disclosing video-viewing history to Facebook and Google.

TikTok also allegedly violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act prohibiting companies from collecting people’s faceprints without their consent.

Amazon is facing claims that it violated BIPA.

In a class action lawsuit from users of online learning company Proctor U, students taking online tests were required to show their student ID to verify their identity - and used Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition technology on the ID’s image without consent.

In this case, the student photographs were apparently converted to “faceprints” which allowed for use of the facial recognition software. However, if the student ID photograph alone was being used as a one-to-one match to verify that the photograph on the ID matches the student sitting in front of the camera, that would not be use of biometrics, as pictures alone and one-to-one matches are not use of biometric technology.

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation passed two federal bills to protect children’s privacy.

This includes the Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act, an enhancement to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). It extends COPPA’s protection from children aged 13 or younger to cover children aged 17 or younger.

The other bill is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) that creates a duty of loyalty, requiring tech companies to prevent harm to minors and provide transparency in their algorithms for users and researchers.