An Aurora-based Hilton franchisee, which runs hotels under the Homewood Suites flag, has been hit with a class action lawsuit, accusing it of violating Illinois’ biometric privacy law.
On April 1, attorneys Mara Baltabols, John Kunze and David Fish, of the Fish Law Firm, of Naperville, filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court against Meridian Lodging Associates LLP.
The complaint, which was brought on behalf of named plaintiff Shonnette Banks, alleges Meridian violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, in the way it allegedly required its workers to scan fingerprints to verify their identity when punching in and out of work shifts using Meridian’s biometric employee timeclocks.
According to the complaint, Banks worked for Meridian “through 2019.” The complaint does not specify the Meridian hotel location at which Banks worked.
The complaint states Meridian operates hotel locations “throughout Illinois.”
According to the complaint, Meridian allegedly did not secure written permission from its employees before requiring them to scan their fingerprints into a database allegedly maintained by Meridian. Nor, the complaint said, did Meridian provide employees with notices, allegedly required by the Illinois BIPA law, informing employees concerning why their fingerprints were being scanned, how the company would store them, use them or distribute them, and how the scanned prints would ultimately be destroyed.
The plaintiffs seek to expand the action to include virtually every employee who worked for Meridian in Illinois.
The plaintiffs are seeking damages, allowed under the BIPA law, of $1,000-$5,000 per violation. In other similar cases, attorneys have indicated the BIPA law could be interpreted to define a violation as each time an employee had scanned their fingerprints. This could amount to several individual violations per day, which could easily push potential damages well into the millions of dollars.
Recently, for instance, Facebook agreed to pay $550 million to settle a class action brought under the Illinois BIPA law over the social media platform’s photo tagging system, which plaintiffs alleged violated BIPA by scanning and storing so-called facial geometry to readily identify everyone included in photos uploaded to the site.
In recent years, however, lawsuits filed under the BIPA law in Cook County Circuit Court and elsewhere have primarily targeted employers of all sizes and types, accusing them over their efforts to require employees to verify their identity when punching the clock, to prevent payroll fraud.
Hundreds of such cases have been filed and many are still pending in Illinois courts.
The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled under BIPA plaintiffs can demand even steep and potentially crippling damages from employers and other companies, even if no one suffered any actual, concrete harm from the fingerprint scans conducted without first satisfying ever provision in the BIPA law.
Cook County Circuit Court Case No. 2020-CH-3658