Employee Files Biometric Privacy Suit Against Beverage Retailer
Binny’s Beverage Depot faces a putative class action alleging the company violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by collecting and sharing employee biometric information without informed consent. Burger v. Gold Standard Enters., Inc., No. 2018CH05904 (Ill. Ch. Ct., Cook Cty., filed May 7, 2018).
The plaintiff alleges that Binny’s established a fingerprint-based time-clock program and shared the collected data with third-party payroll processors and data-storage vendors without providing its employees “informed written consent, and without informing them through a publicly available written policy of how it was going to store and dispose of this irreplaceable information,” and “failed to maintain lawful data retention practices which reduce the risk of theft or other misappropriation of its workers’ biometrics by unauthorized third parties.” The risk was compounded, the complaint asserts, because the biometric data was linked to Social Security numbers, addresses, birth dates and “potentially other relevant financial information.”
Claiming violations of BIPA, fraudulent inducement, negligence and intrusion upon seclusion, the plaintiff seeks class certification, damages, attorney’s fees and an injunction requiring Binny’s to destroy all biometric information in its possession.
