California Judge Allows Illinois Residents’ Biometric Privacy Lawsuit Against Google to Proceed

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Google DOJ Antitrust Case
Mountain View, California, USA - March 28, 2018: Google sign at Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley. Google is an American technology company.

A federal judge in California on Thursday allowed Illinois residents to continue with a simplified version of their class action against Google, accusing the tech giant of violating biometric privacy laws by using facial data collected from IBM.

U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman ruled in favor of Steven Vance and Tim Janecyk, permitting their claim that Google violated the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act (BIPA) by collecting their biometric information without their consent. Judge Freeman also allowed their claim for unjust enrichment under Illinois law to proceed, but only insofar as they seek injunctive relief.

“The court finds that plaintiffs have pled enough facts from which reasonable inferences can be drawn to establish a plausible BIPA violation,” the judge wrote.

However, Judge Freeman dismissed one of the plaintiffs’ claims, ruling that Vance and Janecyk failed to present sufficient facts to show that Google “otherwise profited” from the biometric data. While the plaintiffs argued that Google used the IBM dataset to improve its facial recognition products, including Google Photos and Pixel smartphones, the judge concluded that this wasn’t enough to sustain their claim of profit derived from the data.