Another day, another lawsuit. Apple faces class-action litigation under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) concerning its Photo app’s facial recognition, Face ID eye scans, and Siri voiceprint processing, reports The Sunday Times.
As many as 6.5 million consumers in Illinois could seek $5,000 each in damages from the tech giant for illegally collecting their biometric information through a facial-recognition feature without proper notice, consent or retention policies.
The group of claimants allege Apple collected their biometric data without consent in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The law bans companies from collecting a person’s biometric information unless they first provide notice and obtain the person’s written consent.
Plaintiffs in the class action allege that Apple’s photos app, which comes pre-installed on Apple devices, automatically uses facial recognition technology to scan individual faces and create a unique “faceprint” for each person detected in the user’s photo library.
They claim that once the software has a sufficient sampling of images, the photos app then applies an algorithm to identify the iPhone user, creating biometric information that is stored on the device and catalogued in the photos.
Apple wants the case thrown out, arguing that whether the alleged data qualifies as biometric identifiers or information depends on individualized proof about each user’s choices and labels. It claims that Photos has privacy safeguards so that numerical vectors it uses to organize photo albums cannot recreate a face and are not inherently linked to a person’s name or identity. Apple says it can’t access vector data, does not decrypt or use album labels, and doesn’t know who appears in a user’s albums, whether any album is labelled, or what any label says.
However, last month an Illinois judge ruled that consumers had met the requirements to pursue a class action. On Thursday the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit denied Apple’s appeal against that ruling.
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