JBS Carriers, a trucking company specializing in transporting animal protein, has been accused of allegedly improperly using biometric cameras to monitor its drivers while on the job.
The class action lawsuit was filed by Leon Benford on behalf of himself and other similarly situated individuals. The plaintiffs claim that JBS Carriers violated Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by failing to inform them about the collection and storage of their biometric data.
The complaint alleges that JBS Carriers did not notify its workers where their biometrics were being stored, how long they would be kept, or what might happen to this valuable information. The lawsuit further accuses the company of not obtaining written consent from its workers to collect and store their biometric data and not maintaining a publicly available disclosure of how the biometric data will be handled and destroyed.
The case was filed March 1 in Cook County Circuit Court.
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 someone's biometrics are scanned over a span of five years before the filing of a lawsuit. When multiplied across entire workforces, such potential damage awards could be "annihilative," some judges have observed.
Plaintiffs are represented by attorneys Roberto Luis Costales and William H. Beaumont, of the firm of Beaumont Costales, of Chicago.