Convenience store chain 7-Eleven has become a target of a class action lawsuit under Illinois’ biometrics privacy law, now accused of improperly using facial recognition technology to scan and remember the faces of people entering their stores without their knowledge and consent.
On April 25, attorneys with the firms of Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, of Chicago and Knoxville, Tennessee; Lynch Carpenter, of Chicago; and Freed Kanner London & Millen, of Conshocken, Pennsylvania, filed suit in Chicago federal court against 7-Eleven.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four named plaintiffs, identified as Ryan Hess, Carolyn Johnson, Thomas McKee and Barbara Moss, all Illinois residents who had frequented 7-Eleven stores in Chicago since at least 2020.
The plaintiffs, however, seek to expand the action to cover a class of additional plaintiffs that could include at least thousands of other 7-Eleven customers in Illinois.
The lawsuit centers on 7-Eleven’s alleged use of facial recognition surveillance technology from New York-based Clickit, a vendor providing “intelligent video solutions” to clients, including retailers and banks, for use in improving loss prevention, video analytics and business operations.
According to the complaint, Clickit’s technology scans the faces of people who enter shops using its video surveillance systems, and then captures so-called “biometric identifiers” and stores the data to be used “for tracking purposes.”
According to the complaint, the plaintiffs believe 7-Eleven uses the Clickit technology in surveillance systems at least at some of its stores, including “numerous different 7-Eleven locations in Chicago.”
The complaint notes 7-Eleven has “not disclosed whether it uses facial recognition technology in the U.S.” And the plaintiffs concede that Clickit’s technology allows the face scans and biometric data to be deleted daily.
But the plaintiffs assert this should not matter, because any collection of face scans allegedly violate the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
The Illinois BIPA law has been used by a growing cadre of plaintiffs’ lawyers in recent years to launch a blitz of thousands of class action lawsuits against businesses of many types and sizes.
The lawsuits typically accuse companies of violating three main provisions within the BIPA law, requiring companies to obtain written consent and provide certain notices and information before collecting biometric data, including fingerprints, retinal scans and facial geometry.
The class actions, however, are mainly fueled by the ability of plaintiffs to level demands for potentially massive demands for money from defendants. The BIPA law allows plaintiffs to demand damages of $1,000 to $5,000 per violation. Courts have interpreted the law to define individual violations as each time a fingerprint, face or other biometric identifier is scanned. So, potential damages could quickly run into the many millions, or even billions of dollars, depending on the number of people included in the plaintiffs’ class.
The lawsuits have targeted some of the largest tech companies in the world, most notably including Facebook. The social media giant agreed to pay $650 million to settle claims that its so-called face tagging photo technology violated the BIPA law’s notice and consent provisions.
Class members are due to receive payments of almost $400 each from the settlement, beginning in mid-May. Attorneys who led that class action are slated to get about $97 million in fees.
Mostly, however, the BIPA law has been used to target employers, who require workers to scan their fingerprints when punching the clock to begin and end work shifts. Other related lawsuits have targeted vendors who provide employers with the so-called biometric timeclocks.
Such lawsuits have resulted in settlements ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to more than $50 million, depending on the size of the plaintiffs’ class, with plaintiffs’ lawyers typically receiving a third of the money.
Courts in Illinois have also, to this point, given businesses few options to defeating the lawsuits, or even reducing their potential payouts, which defense lawyers have warned could be “crippling” for some companies.
As courts limit defense options, the number of such BIPA class actions continue to mount in courts in Cook County and other state courts statewide, and in federal courts, as well.
In recent months, a number of class actions have also targeted companies using facial recognition tech, deployed both online and in real world settings.
In the lawsuit against 7-Eleven, the plaintiffs similarly assert the use of the Clickit facial recognition tech allegedly violates the BIPA law’s notice and consent provisions, because customers are not notified of the video surveillance face scans, nor given the opportunity to consent to any alleged scans.
The plaintiffs are seeking damages of $1,000 to $5,000 per violation, plus attorney fees.
The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys Gary Klinger and Alexandra Honeycutt, of the Milberg Coleman firm; Katrina Carroll, of Lynch Carpenter; and Jonathan Jagher, of Freed Kanner.