A company that operates blood plasma donation centers in Chicago, the suburbs and downstate has been hit with a class action lawsuit, accusing it of violating an Illinois state biometrics privacy law in the way it uses fingerprint scanning technology to identify plasma donors and track their donations.
On June 10, attorneys with the Fish Law Firm P.C., of Naperville, filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court against Biomat USA and Talecris Plasma Resources.
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of named plaintiff Brian R. Vaughan, identified only as an Illinois resident who donated plasma at the companies’ donation sites. The plaintiffs are seeking to expand the lawsuit to include a class of potentially everyone who has donated at a Biomat or Talecris plasma collection site in Illinois in the past five years.
Biomat and Talecris are all operated under the same parent company, Grifols, based in Los Angeles.
According to the companies’ website, Biomat and Talecris operate plasma donation sites across the U.S. In Illinois, the companies operate plasma donation centers in Chicago, Rockford, Waukegan, Maywood, Bloomington, Peoria and Champaign.
The complaint specifically accuses the companies of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
The plaintiffs assert Biomat and Talecris require plasma donors to scan fingerprints, as a means of verifying their identity when donating plasma.
The lawsuit asserts the plasma donation companies’ practice leaves donors exposed “to serios and irreversible privacy risks,” including “identify theft, unauthorized tracking, and other improper or unlawful use of this information.”
Specifically, the lawsuit asserts the Biomat and Talecris sites did not first secure “an executed, written release” from donors before collecting their information, nor did the companies provide donors with notices indicating how their fingerprint scans would be stored, used, shared or ultimately destroyed. They assert these are all violations of the Illinois BIPA law, which they said “makes all of these requirements a precondition to the collection or recording of fingerprints” and other biometric identifiers.
The lawsuit seeks damages allowed under the BIPA law of $1,000-$5,000 per violation. A violation under the BIPA law could be interpreted as each time a donor scanned a fingerprint. The class action does not estimate how many people might be included in the lawsuit. But if hundreds of donors have scanned their fingerprints multiple times in the past five years, the damages could quickly climb well into the millions of dollars.
The lawsuit becomes one of the latest among a rising tide of hundreds of such class actions filed under the Illinois BIPA law, targeting Illinois companies.
In recent years, the bulk of such lawsuits have targeted employers over their use of so-called biometric punch clocks, which require employees to scan fingerprints to verify identities.
However, a number of other class actions also target companies over their dealings with consumers, such as those requiring consumers to scan a fingerprint to verify their identity for rewards programs or to purchase an item from a vending machine kiosk at work.
Lawsuits under BIPA have also targeted social media and tech giants, like Facebook.
Big money can often be on the line. Facebook, for instance, recently agreed to pay $550 million to settle a class action over its photo tagging software.