Amazon’s giant cloud computing subsidiary has been targeted by a new class action lawsuit under Illinois’ biometrics privacy law, accusing Amazon Web Services of improperly boosting the performance of its facial recognition software by scanning the faces of people who upload their ID photos to a job application site.
On Sept. 1, attorneys with the firms of Stephan Zouras and Romanucci & Blandin, both of Chicago, filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court against AWS, claiming the company has violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act through alleged activity in partnership with mobile job application app, Wonolo.
The company that operates Wonolo is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
According to the lawsuit, AWS supports Wonolo’s operations by hosting Wonolo data and providing Wonolo with access to the AWS image-recognition program, Rekognition.
According to the lawsuit, Wonolo serves as an online staffing platform to help connect employers to people looking for temporary jobs. The Wonolo platform then purportedly helps employers manage and track their work across numerous industries, including retail, delivery services, office administration, event staffing and general labor.
According to the lawsuit, Wonolo requires job applicants to first create a profile on the app that includes an image of the job applicant’s face.
According to the lawsuit, workers then check in at workplaces by scanning their face on a Wonolo device at the job site.
The lawsuit asserts the check-in process is enabled by Rekognition, which stores and analyzes the facial images uploaded by workers, and then compares the worker’s face scan at the job site against the facial image stored in the Wonolo database.
According to the complaint, AWS also uses face scans and comparisons, such as it performs for Wonolo, to help Rekognition “improve its machine learning and AI technologies.” AWS allegedly then sells its improved product to “businesses, law enforcement agencies, and other entities,” according to the complaint.
The lawsuit centers on claims brought by named plaintiff Cynthia Redd. The complaint claims Redd used Wonolo’s app in May 2020 to find work, accepting several jobs, and scanning her face through Wonolo at various job sites to verify her identity and track her work hours.
According to the complaint, these scans violated Redd’s rights and those of other workers under the Illinois BIPA law. The complaint claims AWS was required to first get workers’ written consent and provide notices concerning how the face scans would be stored, used, shared and ultimately destroyed.
The BIPA law has been used in recent years to launch thousands of class action lawsuits against employers and tech companies of all kinds.
And those class actions have proven profitable, generating settlements that range from the hundreds of thousands of dollars to as much as $650 million, with plaintffs’ lawyers generally taking about a third of those settlement dollars in fees.
The settlements, however, are relatively small compared to plaintiffs could win should they prevail at trial. The BIPA law allows plaintiffs to demand $1,000-$5,000 per violation. The law has been interpreted to define individual violations as each time a business scans an Illinois resident’s so-called biometric identifier, such as a fingerprint or facial image, without notice and consent.
Multiplied across numerous potential violations per person, and with an unknown number of class members per claim, damages could quickly climb into the many millions or even billions of dollars, depending on the size of the company or business operation being sued.
At the same time, courts have to this point provided very few ways for businesses to ward off the lawsuits, without facing big costs and even larger risks across many years in court.
As a result, a growing number of businesses have opted to simply settle class actions under the BIPA law. That has, in turn, prompted a growing number of plaintiffs’ law firms to add their names to the ranks of lawyers bringing BIPA-related class actions.
In the class action against AWS, plaintiffs are seeking to expand the action to include a class of more plaintiffs. The plaintiffs did not estimate how many additional plaintiffs there may be, saying only the number would be more than 50, a threshold for bringing a class action.
The plaintiffs are seeking $1,000-$5,000 per violation, as allowed under the BIPA law.
Plaintiffs are represented by attorneys Mohammed A. Rathur, Ryan F. Stephan and Catherine T. Mitchell, of the Stephan Zouras firm, and David A. Neiman, of the Romanucci firm.