Yes. This is actually a huge settlement, driven by the fact that the Illinois biometric law has statutory damages of $1,000-5,000 per incident. As the article notes, the Equifax settlement was smaller despite being involving way more customers. Because proving actual harm for privacy violations is difficult.
The prior media coverage of this suit described it as a $35bn lawsuit, because the working number was 7mm incidents and the media assumed (and plaintiff alleged) Facebook acted “intentionally or recklessly” and went with the $5k/incident damages.
If we assume the 7mm Illinois resident incidents number is correct, Facebook settled for about $79/incident.
On the one hand Facebook would obviously not want to pay any amount in a lawsuit over their facial recognition feature, but on the other hand the law was about 1% as impactful as it had been written to be.
