In the wake of the $650 million paid out by Facebook parent Meta, SnapChat users in Illinois are demanding the operators of the popular social media app also pay out, accusing Snap of also violating Illinois’ strict biometrics privacy law.
On May 11, attorney James C. Vlahakis, of the Sulaiman Law Group, of suburban Lombard, filed suit in Chicago federal court against Snap Inc. The class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of named plaintiffs Maribel Ocampo and Adrian Coss.
The plaintiffs are identified in the complaint only as people who live in northern Illinois and have used SnapChat, the photo sharing app developed and operated by Santa Monica, California-based Snap.
The lawsuit centers on the SnapChat app’s Lenses feature, which allows users to augment their images, known as Snaps, to add a variety of effects, frames and filters.
The lawsuit claims the Lenses feature improperly uses facial recognition technology developed by Looksery Inc. to capture images of users’ faces. The lawsuit asserts Snap captures users’ faces without their consent, and without notifying them that their images were being captured.
The lawsuit asserts those alleged failures by Snap violates the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
The BIPA law has been on the books since 2008. However, since 2015, a growing cadre of plaintiffs’ lawyers have used the law to spawn a blitz of thousands of class action lawsuits. The bulk of the lawsuits have targeted employers, accusing them of improperly requiring workers to scan their fingerprints or other biometric identifiers when punching the clock to begin or end work shifts, or to access secure areas in the workplace.
But a significant number of the lawsuits have also taken aim at big tech companies, like Facebook and Google.
And the law carries a big potential bite. Under the law, plaintiffs can demand damages of $1,000-$5,000 per violation. Courts have interpreted the law to define individual violations as each time a company’s technology scans a user’s unique biometric identifiers, which can include their facial geometry.
When multiplied across thousands or even millions of users, scanning biometric identifiers multiple times per day, the potential damages can rise well into the many millions or even billions of dollars.
In their new complaint, the plaintiffs estimate as many as 500,000 Snaps could have been created that allegedly violate the BIPA law. That could place Snap on the hook for as much as $2.5 billion in damages, should Snap take the case to trial and lose.
When sued under the BIPA law for claims related to face scans conducted under its photo tagging feature, Facebook estimated it could also face billions of dollars in potential damages, if it had lost at trial. To eliminate its risk of such a payout, Facebook instead agreed to settle the case for $650 million. That resulted in payouts of about $400 to Illinois Facebook users, and nearly $100 million in fees for the lawyers who brought the case.
Google has also agreed to pay $100 million to end the claims against them, related to face scans in the Google Photos app.
Despite the potential for massive damages, courts have also rejected nearly every attempt by defendants to get out from under the lawsuits, or even to reduce their potential liability. The Illinois Supreme Court, for instance, has specifically ruled that plaintiffs suing under the BIPA law don’t need to establish they suffered any kind of particular or concrete injury stemming from the improper biometric scans.
The court has said plaintiffs need only allege their rights were violated under the law to bring massive lawsuits, that business groups and defendants have said could be potentially ruinous. This has prompted calls from business groups for reform, to stem the rising tide of so-called “gotcha” class action lawsuits under BIPA.
The plaintiffs in the Snap action are seeking certification of a class of potentially millions of other SnapChat users in Illinois.