FB pixel

Insurance liability under Illinois’ biometric data privacy law gets another look

AI draws attention to core issue of data ownership
Insurance liability under Illinois’ biometric data privacy law gets another look
 

Insurers are on the hook to defend separate defendants accused breaking the U.S. state of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act.

Tony’s Finer Foods Enterprises’ commercial insurer Continental Western is owed coverage as part of the grocery company’s general liability policy, an Illinois federal judge has ruled. Tony’s is accused in case 1:22-cv-03575of collecting employee fingerprints without consent, a violation of BIPA.

The case is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

A similar decision was recently handed down in the putative class action (22-2313) Citizens Insurance v. Wynndalco Enterprises.

A Seventh Circuit judge ruled that Citizens must honor the business liability policy it sold to Wynndalco, which faces two proposed class action. Wynndalco was an intermediary in the sale of a picture-scraper Clearview AI subscription to CDW-Government, the purchasing agent for the Chicago Police Department.

The plaintiffs alleged that using the subscription violated BIPA.

In the case between Citizens and Wynndalco, the insurer said its violation-of-statutes exclusion barred coverage against these suits. But an analysis by Reed Smith attorneys for Law360 says the court had to construe the ambiguity of the exclusion in favor of Wynndalco, given that a list of statutes contained in the provision does not mention the right to privacy.

Meanwhile, Google and YouTube’s bid to have a BIPA case dismissed failed.

In a putative class action (3:22-cv-06987), YouTube and Google are accused of violating BIPA by harvesting biometric identifiers through a pair of video-editing tools, called Face Blur and Thumbnail Generator without consent.

The motion to dismiss was rejected because the plaintiff’s privacy interests were directly affected when YouTube did not post its data-management policies as required by BIPA.

And for a change of pace, plaintiffs are charging OpenAI and its benefactor Microsoft with scraping and misappropriating consumers’ biometric identifiers, according to marketing analysis by the law firm Ballard Spahr. The data is being use in training large language models, allegedly.

While the proposed class action was not filed under BIPA, the firm says the case could put a light on the issues at the Illinois’ law’s core: an individual’s right to own, control and be informed about issues involving their biometric data.

Article Topics

 |   |   |   |   | 

Latest Biometrics News

 

Biometrics and injection detection for deepfake defense a rising priority

Biometrics integrations with injection attack detection to defend the latest front in the global battle against fraud, deepfakes, is the…

 

Biometric Update Podcast looks at the road to a global standard for age assurance

Episode 2 of the Biometric Update Podcast is a dispatch from the 2025 Global Age Assurance Standards Summit, held from…

 

WEF launches new DPI initiative focused on emerging tech, including biometrics

Global Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) initiatives are lagging behind emerging technologies such as AI, which could lead to inefficiencies, bottlenecks…

 

Odds are good for biometrics firms in the global gambling sector

Gambling has always been a vice associated with certain kinds of criminal activity, but the development of the online gambling…

 

New Zealand issues tender for digital ID services accreditation infrastructure

New Zealand’s accredited digital identity services regulator, the Trust Framework Authority (TFA), has published a request for information (RFI) for…

 

Pindrop surpasses $100M in annual recurring revenue, kicks off BU podcast

A release from Atlanta-based voice biometrics firm Pindrop celebrates a milestone: the firm has surpassed US$100 million in Annual Recurring…

Comments

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Market Analysis

Most Viewed This Week

Featured Company

Biometrics Insight, Opinion

Digital ID In-Depth

Biometrics White Papers

Biometrics Events