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COOK COUNTY RECORD

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Class action targets Proctortrack over data breach, exposing college students' facial scans

Lawsuits
Law malmstrom carl

Carl Malmstrom | Wolf Haldenstein

Verificient Technologies, a vendor that operates the Proctortrack online college test monitoring service used by Loyola University Chicago and others, has become the target of a class action lawsuit under Illinois’ biometrics privacy law.

On Feb. 17, attorneys with the firm of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz, of Chicago, filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court against Verificient, accusing it of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA.)

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of named plaintiff Andrew Lam, of suburban Morton Grove. Lam is identified as a student at Loyola University in Chicago.

According to the complaint, Proctortrack enables colleges to administer student exams remotely, by monitoring students for suspicious behavior that might indicate they are trying to cheat. Proctortrack does this by deploying “proprietary facial-recognition software” and “behavior detection algorithms,” the complaint said.

Proctortrack then creates an “identity profile” for students taking online exams, the complaint said.

The complaint also accuses Proctortrack of violating the BIPA law by allegedly failing to “store, transmit and protect from disclosure” those student biometric profiles. The complaint pointed to a data breach Verificient suffered in September 2020, when its Proctortrack source code was hacked and leaked online.

The complaint said this exposed videos of students taking tests, including scans of their eye movements and facial geometry, which qualify under the BIPA law as protected biometric identifiers, according to the complaint.

The complaint seeks to expand the action to include “all students at Loyola University Chicago” whose facial geometry was scanned while using Proctortrack.

This could include as many as 16,500 students, the complaint said.

Loyola University Chicago is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

The complaint seeks damages of $1,000-$5,000 per violation, as allowed under the BIPA law.

Plaintiffs are represented by attorney Carl V. Malmstrom, of the Wolf Haldenstein firm.

The Proctotrack follows another test proctoring claim under the BIPA law, filed against Northwestern University in Evanston. That lawsuit, filed Jan. 27, accuses Northwestern of improperly scanning students’ faces while using online test proctoring, without first providing notice of the face scans, or obtaining their written consent.

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