US: Scrapbook company faces lawsuit for collecting face scans
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A digital scrapbook company is facing a class action lawsuit from people who say it violated their privacy by collecting their face scans without consent.
Shutterfly’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that state laws controlling the collection and use of biometric data were not relevant to the case, has been rejected by the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
The company argued that biometric data obtained from photographs was not covered by the law, only in-person face scans.
In a 19-page opinion published by Fortune, US District Judge Joan Gottschall disagreed with the company’s interpretation of Illinois’ 2008 Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), the “first law in the nation to address the collection and storage of biometric data”.
She said Shutterfly’s interpretation of the law “would leave little room for the law to adapt and respond to technological development”, posing the question: “Who knows how iris scans, retina scans, fingerprints, voiceprints, and scans of faces and hands will be taken in the future?”
The lawsuit has been brought by people who are not Shutterfly users but say their biometric identifiers, including scans of their face geometry, were recorded in Shutterfly’s database because photos of them were uploaded and tagged by Shutterfly users.
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