The company that operates many of Chicago’s famed architecture river tours, and other popular sightseeing excursions, has become one of the latest employers targeted by a class action lawsuit under Illinois’ biometrics privacy law.
On Nov. 12, attorney James X. Bormes, of Chicago, filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court against the company that operates Shoreline Charters and Shoreline Sightseeing Cruises.
The complaint was filed on behalf of named plaintiff James Nieto, identified as an Illinois resident who worked for Shoreline from 2016-2017.
James X. Bormes
| bormeslaw.com
According to its website, Shoreline operates Chicago’s largest fleet of sightseeing boats and water taxis. The company boasts that its Chicago architecture tours were voted the “Most Popular Tour in America” on Tripadvisor from 2017-2020.
Nieto’s complaint accuses Shoreline of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Protection Act during the time Nieto worked there, in the way Shoreline required its workers to scan their fingerprints to verify their identity when punching in and out of work shifts.
According to the complaint, Shoreline allegedly failed to secure written consent from workers before requiring the fingerprint scans, and also did not provide workers with notices the plaintiffs claim is required by the BIPA law, concerning how the scanned fingerprint data would be stored, shared, used and ultimately destroyed.
The complaint further accuses Shoreline of sharing the fingerprint data with its payroll processor vendor, which the plaintiffs claim also violated the BIPA law.
The BIPA law has been used by a growing cadre of trial lawyers in Illinois to launch class action suits against thousands of companies doing business in Illinois. Cook County’s courts have been particularly popular destinations for such lawsuits.
While the suits have targeted tech giants like Facebook and Google, they have mostly been aimed, so far, at Illinois employers who have required workers to scan their fingerprints on so-called biometric punch clocks, to accurately track their work hours and prevent so-called “punch fraud” on jobsites.
Since the first such BIPA class actions were launched in 2015, more and more businesses have opted to settle, rather than risk potentially catastrophic damages that businesses have argued could cripple their operations.
Under the BIPA law, plaintiffs are allowed to demand damages of $1,000-$5,000 per violation. Attorneys on both sides have defined individual violations as each time each employee scans a fingerprint, for instance. When multiplied over an entire workforce, such potential damages could leave employers holding the bag on judgments worth millions, or even billions of dollars, depending on the number of workers a business may employ, should such cases go to trial.
Courts have also routinely denied employers nearly every avenue of legal defense attempted to date to sidestep such class action lawsuits, or at least reduce their potential exposure to damages.
Rather than risk such massive legal bills, many employers have opted to settle in recent months, with settlements ranging from payouts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to $25 million.
The complaint against Shoreline estimates the company may employ more than 100 workers who could qualify to be part of the class action.