The lawsuit against Facebook was filed in 2015.
Social media giant Facebook (now Meta) is paying $397 (Rs 30,785) to more than a million residents of Illinois, in the United States, for collecting and storing digital scans of their faces without permission. The money is being paid from the settlement fund set up by Facebook last year to settle a class-action lawsuit.
The lawsuit was filed in 2015 and accused Facebook of violating a state privacy law that forbids companies from collecting biometric data without informing users.
Some users were surprised by the amount received - as cheques or direct transfer to bank accounts - and thought the money could be a scam.
The social media platform faced global criticism for the facial recognition technology on Facebook and Instagram. In the settlement reached last year, the company announced halting of the feature and agreed to pay $650 million to end the lawsuit.
Facebook also told a federal judge that it will delete more than 1 billion users' facial templates.
The money is being split among Illinois Facebook users who filed claims by December 2020 after deducting the costs and $97.5 million fee of the attorneys, according to NBC News.
Nearly 1.6 million Illinois residents were included in the settlement against the now-halted photo-tagging system of Facebook. Their lawyers said that the platform's "Suggested Tags" feature violated the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act.
Facebook was using the photo-tagging technology since 2010, which allowed quick and easy tagging of photos. But many on the internet started complaining as the technology got sophisticated, accusing it of wrongly identifying people of colour.
Voices are being raised in many countries against the practices adopted by internet companies and social media platforms to collect data, with politicians calling for stringent laws against such firms. California Governor Gavin Newsom and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang have proposed that these tech companies should pay a "dividend" to users.