Illinois citizens who qualify for a portion of this $35 million can file their claim on this website before November 5th. Of course, since the settlement requires the court’s final approval, they shouldn’t anticipate getting their checks any time soon. Illinois is one of the top states with strict regulations to protect individuals’ data when it comes to data privacy. Snap was ordered to pay $35 million by the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) for its data collection methods. Illinois government and citizens may object to any business or application in accordance with the BIPA statute.
The parent firm of Snapchat, Snap, has to pay $35 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit in Illinois, according to Inputmag (via Chicago Tribune). Previously, the business was charged with using Snapchat’s filters and lenses to gather user data. The initial claims in this action were made in 2015. Residents of Illinois sued the business that year for gathering personal data without their consent. This lawsuit has continued ever since. The people of Illinois who sued Snap can now get between $58 and $117.
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While we are certain that Lenses do not infringe on BIPA, we rolled out an in-app consent notice for Snapchatters in Illinois earlier this year out of an abundance of caution and to demonstrate our dedication to user privacy, according to Boogaard. It’s not the first time that BIPA has criticised tech firms. A prior lawsuit involving Facebook’s automated photo-tagging tool resulted in the company being ordered by the law to pay $650 million. Google also consented to pay $100 million in June to resolve a legal dispute involving a face grouping function in Google Photos. The BIPA legislation allegedly was broken by the feature.
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As for collecting “biometric data that can be used to identify a specific person or even engage in facial identification,” Snap asserts that it has never broken the BIPA. According to Pete Boogaard, a spokesman for Snap, the Snapchat lenses only analyse data on-device and don’t transmit any information to the company’s servers. Even more, the business claims that Illinois citizens’ applications now include an in-app consent message.