A group of individuals who previously opted out of Google's $100 million settlement under Illinois' biometrics privacy law have filed a collective action lawsuit against the tech giant, seeking a big payday of their own.
In 2022, a group of class action lawyers, led by attorney Robert Ahdoot, of the firm of Ahdoot & Wolfson, of Burbank , California, announced a $100 million settlement with Google, appearing to end nearly six years of litigation. The case against Google stood as one of the longest running class action lawsuits under the law known as the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
That lawsuit was similar to an earlier case brought by other law firms against Facebook. The lawsuit accused Google, through its Photos app, of improperly scanning the faces of people imaged in photos uploaded to the app, without first obtaining written consent from those people and without providing certain notices concerning its biometric data retention policies, as allegedly required by the BIPA law.
However, in the summer of 2023, a Cook County judge signed off on a report from those plaintiffs' lawyers, indicating the per person payout under the settlement, would decline to just $95 per person, from an estimated $154 per person, because more people had registered a claim for a cut of the proceeds than had been anticipated when the settlement was announced.
Attorneys in that class action, however, still received $35 million in fees.
Through the process, however, a number of potential class members opted to intentionally exclude themselves from the large settlement, seeking to preserve their rights to file lawsuits of their own.
In their new lawsuit, the plaintiffs continue to allege that Google wrongfully scanned their faces in pictures uploaded to Google Photos without their consent, violating the BIPA law.
However, in their lawsuit, they are seeking far more than $95 per person. Instead, they believe they are each entitled to $1,000-$5,000 per alleged violation of the BIPA law.
The damages, however, could be significantly more than that. Under recent decisions, the Illinois Supreme Court has interpreted the BIPA law to define individual violations as each time a company scans people's so-called biometric identifiers, not merely the first time, over a five year period. The lawsuit asserts Google Photos had allegedly improperly scanned people's faces in uploaded photos since at least 2015.
The complaint does not estimate how many "individual violation" claims the plaintiffs may attempt to hit Google with in their new lawsuit.
They will also seek potentially large attorney fees.
The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit are represented by attorneys Erika Lee Finley, of Franklin Park, and Paúl Camarena, of Alexandria, Virginia.