Bike sharing company Motivate LLC has been accused in a class action lawsuit of improperly requiring workers to scan their fingerprints when clocking in and out of work shifts.
The suit was filed by named plaintiff Julio Cortez on behalf of all similarly situated individuals, alleging that the company violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).
According to the complaint, Cortez, identified only as a resident of Illinois, has worked for Motivate since 2022.
Attorney Mark Hammervold of Hammervold Law, LLC
| Hammervold Law, LLC
The complaint states that Motivate LLC captured, collected, stored, disseminated, and used the biometrics of employees without their informed written consent. BIPA stipulates that private entities must inform individuals in writing if their biometrics are to be collected or stored, state the specific purpose and duration for which such data is being collected, receive a written release from the individual, and make publicly available written retention guidelines for permanently destroying biometric identifiers and information.
The potential payout from Motivate could be large.
Plaintiffs are seeking damages of $1,000-$5,000 per alleged violation, as allowed under BIPA.
The lawsuit and its demands follow a pattern set by thousands of similar class actions filed against Illinois employers in the past eight years under the BIPA law. Those lawsuits have resulted in a litany of multi-million dollar settlements, and hundreds of millions of dollars in collective attorney fees paid to class action lawyers who file the suits, thanks in large part to a series of Illinois Supreme Court decisions which have interpreted the law in ways that have left most employers largely defenseless against such legal claims.
Notably, the state high court has declared plaintiffs don't need to prove they were actually harmed by the biometric scans, and the court has defined "individual violations" as each time a worker scans their fingerprint over a span of five years before the filing of a lawsuit. When multiplied across entire workforces punching a timeclock multiple times per day, such potential damage awards could be "annihilative," some judges have observed.
The lawsuit was filed on Feb. 2 in Cook County Circuit Court.
Plaintiffs are represented in the action by attorney Mark Hammervold, of Hammervold Law, of Elmhurst.