Earlier this month, a federal court in Illinois dismissed a BIPA fingerprint timekeeping class action that had been pending for over three years, finding that Plaintiff failed to adequately allege a claim under Section 15(b) of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. Stauffer v. Innovative Heights Fairview Heights, LLC, 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 140010 (S.D. Ill. Aug. 5, 2022). This ruling was based on the Court’s primary conclusion that:
Nowhere in her complaint does Plaintiff allege that [Defendant] itself stored biometric information on its own computers or servers, or that [Defendant] used the biometric information for its own purposes. In fact, Plaintiff does not allege that [Defendant] actually accessed this information. Plaintiff” allegations are simply that [Defendant] could access the biometric information one day. But equally as plausible as [Defendant] accessing the information one day is that [Defendant] never accessed the information.
As reported earlier in CPW’s 2022 Q1 AI/Biometric Litigation Trends by Kristin Bryan, David Oberly and Christina Lamoureux, the majority of BIPA cases filed thus far in 2022 arise under the circumstances analogous to the Stauffer litigation in the timekeeping context. As such, the Court’s ruling in this case is anticipated to bear upon other pending and future filed cases.
In this instance, the Court rejected the Plaintiff’s allegations that the use of a uniform franchise agreement which (i) required franchisees adopt a common timekeeping system (“POS System”) that “collect[ed] employee fingerprints and information used to identify such employees based on their fingerprints” and (ii) and gave the Defendant “the right to have independent access to all information or data” on the POS System used by franchisees sufficient for purposes of a pleading a cognizable Section 15(b) BIPA claim.
Read on to learn more about the particular facts of this case and the Court’s analysis.Continue Reading Federal Court Rejects Terms in Franchise Agreement Retaining Data Access Rights As Sufficient to Plead Section 15(b) BIPA Claim