A Wheeling woman and her Northbrook lawyers have returned to court to partner once again with two more class action lawsuits targeting online beauty product retailers with class action lawsuits under Illinois' stringent biometrics privacy law.
As in her previous lawsuits, she is accusing these companies of improperly scanning the faces of customers using their online virtual try-on tools.
Named plaintiff Jennifer Conidi filed multiple class action lawsuits in Cook County Circuit Court on April 3, each accusing the different defendant companies of similar violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).
Cases filed April 3 include:
Jennifer Conidi vs. Beauty Industry Group, OPCO, LLC, which does business as Luxy Hair Company. Beauty Industry Group (BIG), established in 2004 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, owns and operates multiple businesses within the professional beauty industry. BIG’s professional products are sold and distributed across the world and are sold in more than 1,300 stores with collective brands servicing more than 30,000 salons. BIG added Luxy Hair Company to its corporate roster in 2018. Luxy Hair specializes in professionally installed hair extensions and related beauty products. Luxy offers visitors to their website the ability to select a desired shade of hair via a "color match" virtual try-on tool. Customers are directed to scan their face and upload the image to be analyzed.
Jennifer Conidi vs Grande Cosmetics. Grande Cosmetics develops and manufactures over 40 product lines including serums and double-duty make-up products to enhance the user's appearance. Their website offers a virtual try-on tool where customers can "sample" various cosmetics to select their custom look by uploading their image to the website.
Class action lawsuits under the BIPA law continue to grow exponentially, attractive to both lawyers and plaintiffs for potential big payoffs. The BIPA law was enacted in 2008 ostensibly to protect people's so-called biometric identifiers from being lost or stolen, potentially leading to dangerous kinds of identity theft.
The law, however, has been used since 2015 to launch thousands of potentially "crippling" lawsuits against a host of different companies, seeking to land potentially massive paydays that can run well into the many millions or even billions of dollars per lawsuit.
Both of the named defendants in Conidi's cases are accused of violating BIPA for allegedly failing to obtain informed consent from users before scanning their face geometry. The lawsuits also accuse the companies of failing to provide certain required notices concerning how the scanned information could be used, shared and ultimately destroyed. These suits each contend that users are allegedly not notified their biometric data would be collected and shared with third parties.
It is not known how many other people may be included in the class actions, though the complaints indicate there could be tens of thousands of Illinois residents impacted, including Conidi.
The Friedman firm has offices in suburban Northbrook and in Woodland Hills, California.
The lawsuits all seek damages of $1,000 to $5,000 per violation, as allowed by the BIPA law, plus attorney fees and court costs. The Illinois Supreme Court has interpreted the law to allow plaintiffs to define individual violations as each time someone's biometric identifiers are scanned, not just the first time, dating back up to five years in the past, putting defendants at risk of what some on the state Supreme Court warned could amount to potentially "annihilative" damages.