California photo app developer settles FTC complaint over facial recognition

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facial recognition

Everalbum, a photo app developer based in California, settled an administrative complaint against it by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding its facial recognition technology. The company is also doing business as Ever and Paravision.

In the complaint, the FTC alleged Everalbum deceived consumers by falsely telling them that it was not using its facial recognition technology on its photo storage and organization app called Ever.

There are approximately 12 million Ever users worldwide. The app allows users to upload photos and videos to its cloud servers from various sources including their computers, mobile devices, social media accounts,  and cloud-based storage services.

Everalbum failed to provide users an option to disable facial recognition

According to the Commission, Everalbum launched the “Friends” feature on Ever in February 2017. The company allegedly enabled facial recognition by default and it failed to provide users an option to turn off or disable the feature.

In addition, the FTC alleged that the company particularly misled users located in Illinois, Texas, Washington, and the European Union.