A federal district court has ruled that a plaintiff can continue with his alleged class action lawsuit against a facial recognition software company that he claims has violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
Fredy Sosa, a member of Bellevue, Washington-based OfferUp Inc., an online marketplace that partnered with London-based software company Onfido to verify the identities of its users, said that in April 2020, he verified his identity with OfferUp using its mobile application to upload pictures of his driver’s license and of his face, according to Monday’s ruling by the U.S. District Court in Chicago in Fredy Sosa v. Onfido Inc.
Mr Sosa said that Onfido did not inform him that they would collect, store or use his biometric identifier and that he never signed a written notice allowing it to do so, nor was he informed of the company̵
7;s biometric data storage policy, contrary to BIPA.The dispositive question is whether the information that Onfido is alleged to have obtained reasonably constitutes a scan of facial geometry. We conclude that it does, it is stated in the judgment.
“The facial expressions extracted by Onfido are likely to be facial geometry scans, and therefore (are)” biometric identifiers “according to BIPA, it said, adding,” Onfido’s arguments to the contrary are invalid. “
The judgment also rejected Onfido’s argument that the information it allegedly obtained could not be a “scan of the face geometry” because it “was not a scan of the plaintiff’s actual face” but rather a “scan of a photograph of his face. “
Lawyers in the case did not respond to a request for comment.
Another district court in Chicago ruled late last month that a unit in the Hannover Insurance Group must defend an information technology company in two class-action lawsuits filed under BIPA, concluding that an exemption from the policy is ambiguous.
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