Vance v. IBM

Vance v. IBM

Opinion

MEMORANDUM OPINION

CHARLES P. KOCORAS, District Judge:

Before the Court is Defendant International Business Machines Corporation's ("IBM") motion to dismiss Plaintiffs Steven Vance ("Vance") and Tim Janecyk's ("Janecyk") (collectively, "Plaintiffs") Second Amended Class Action Complaint ("SAC") under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6). For the following reasons, [*2]  the Court will grant the motion in part.

BACKGROUND

For purposes of this motion, the Court accepts as true the following facts from the complaint. Alam v. Miller Brewing Co., 709 F.3d 662, 665-66 (7th Cir. 2013). All reasonable inferences are drawn in Plaintiffs' favor. League of Women Voters of Chicago v. City of Chicago, 757 F.3d 722, 724 (7th Cir. 2014).

Plaintiffs Vance and Janecyk are both Illinois residents. Defendant IBM is a multinational technology corporation organized under the laws of the State of New York with a corporate headquarters in Armonk, New York.

Vance has had an account with Flickr, a photo sharing service, since 2006. In 2008, Vance uploaded a photo of himself and two family members to Flickr from his computer in Illinois. Similarly, Janecyk has had a Flickr account since 2008 and uploaded a photo of himself to Flickr in 2011. Yahoo!, Flickr's parent company at the time, subsequently made Vance's photo available to IBM in 2014 when it released over 99 million photos in a single, downloadable dataset called YFCC100M ("Flickr Dataset").

Plaintiffs allege that IBM used the Flickr Dataset to create its own dataset (the "IBM Dataset"). The IBM Dataset was allegedly comprised of over one million front-facing images of human faces. In each image, IBM allegedly extracted 68 key-points and at least ten facial coding schemes, [*3]  such as craniofacial distances, craniofacial areas, craniofacial ratios, facial symmetry, facial regions contrast, skin color, age prediction, gender prediction, subjective annotation, and pose and resolution.

Plaintiffs allege that IBM subsequently disseminated a dataset created from information extracted from the IBM Dataset. IBM called this dataset "Diversity in Faces" ("DIF Dataset"). Each image in the DIF Dataset could allegedly be traced back to the individual Flickr account to which it was originally uploaded.

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