Amazon has been targeted by a class action lawsuit, as delivery drivers contend they were illegally required to use facial scanning technology before they could accept work and deliver packages.
Named plaintiff Rodneka Perry filed the lawsuit against several Amazon affiliated companies, including Amazon Logistics and Amazon Web Services in Cook County Circuit Court on April 17, over allegations that the e-commerce mega giant violated the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act by requiring drivers to undergo improper facial recognition screening practices without their expressed consent or knowledge.
Amazon Logistics is a subsidiary of Amazon, and provides the fulfillment and delivery means for Amazon.com through one of its service delivery providers, Amazon Flex, which pays independent contractors to deliver packages on behalf of AWS using their own vehicles. Drivers may flex their workload as their personal schedule allows.
According to the complaint, in September 2018, Perry downloaded the Flex app, created an account and began working as a contract delivery agent for Amazon.
According to the complaint, Amazon Flex installed a feature which uses Rekognition, an image recognition system, in mid-2019. Before a driver could accept work and deliver packages, they allegedly were required to use their personal mobile device to scan their face for identity verification purposes. Any Flex user must also have first provided a photo for the application to collect and store the user's facial geometry biometric data. According to the complaint, this data is also shared with Amazon software platforms which also included the Rekognintion system.
Amazon has been using Artificial Intelligence image and video recognition systems, including Rekognition, since 2016. AWS not only uses this system, but also sells and markets it to businesses, government entities and third party users.
Like other similar BIPA complaints, this most recent lawsuit contends Amazon violated the law by allegedly failing to obtain prior express consent from its drivers, and by allegedly failing to provide BIPA law notices about why Amazon needs to scan their faces and how the stored facial scans will be used, maintained and ultimately destroyed.
Like Amazon, other tech giants, including Apple, Google and Facebook have all been hit with BIPA class actions in Illinois, as part of the still-rising flood of BIPA-related litigation. And like so many of those lawsuits, it carries the potential of massive payouts. Faced with such risk, many companies, including Facebook and Google, have opted to settle out of court, sometimes for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Under recent Illinois Supreme Court decisions, the potential payout from Amazon under such a lawsuit could be very large, as well. Earlier this year, the state high court ruled the BIPA law should be interpreted to allow plaintiffs to demand damages of $1,000 or $5,000 per allegedly scan of a face or other so-called biometric identifiers. And those damages can stretch back five years, the court said, and could be multiplied across thousands of contract drivers and employees annually.
The plaintiffs are demanding a trial by jury and are seeking the damages of $1,000 to $5,000 per violation, as allowed by the BIPA law, plus legal fees and court costs.
Plaintiff is represented by Ryan F. Stephan, Mohammed A. Rathur, and Catherine T. Mitchell, of the Stephan Zouras firm, of Chicago.