Is America's Strongest Biometric Privacy Law About To Be Gutted?

One way to avoid difficult legislation is to change the law altogether. At least, that might be what is about to happen in Illinois. One of the strongest state digital privacy statutes may soon be gutted. Known as the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), this Illinois state law expressly forbids companies from collecting personal identifiers from people without informed consent. A new amendment is being pushed through that could dramatically change the meaning of the law.

When it was first enacted in 2008, BIPA was meant to prevent people’s personal biological information from being collected by technology companies. This meant that if an online service was collecting your physical data, it had to explicitly let you know. Over the last year, Facebook has been fighting a class action lawsuit that alleges that its photo tagging program–-which scans digital photos, and uses facial recognition to automatically identify people–-is in direct violation of the Illinois law. Facebook has been vigorously fighting this suit, claiming on multiple occasions that it is without merit. Earlier in May, a judge ruled against Facebook’s motion to dismiss the case, meaning it would be brought to trial. This latest amendment might change all that. Chris Dore, a partner at the law firm Edelson PC (which represents the class action suit being brought against Facebook) explained that this change would essentially "carve out a huge chunk of it." In his estimation, the change would make it possible for companies to collect digital biometric data-–like facial templates-–without any consent at all. As Dore put it, this amendment would take the teeth out of the privacy act.