According to Inputmag (via Chicago Tribune), the Snapchat parent company Snap has to pay $35 million to settle a class-action lawsuit in Illinois. The company was formerly accused of collecting users’ data through Snapchat’s filters and lenses.
The roots of this lawsuit date back to 2015. That year, Illinois residents sued the company for collecting their data without consent. Since then, this lawsuit has been going on. Now, the Illinois residents who sued Snap can receive between $58 and $117.
The Illinois residents who are eligible to receive a part of this $35 million can submit their claim before November 5 on this website. Of course, they shouldn’t expect to receive their checks any time soon as the settlement needs the court’s final approval.
Illinois residents get some cash for suing Snap
When it comes to data privacy, Illinois is one of the leading states with stringent laws to protect citizens’ data. Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) is the same law that made Snap pay $35 million for its data collecting practices. Under the BIPA law, Illinois officials and residents can challenge every company and application.
Snap claims it has never violated the BIPA, and they don’t collect “biometric data that can be used to identify a specific person or even engage in facial identification.” Snap spokesperson Pete Boogaard also said the Snapchat lenses process the data within the device and don’t send any data to Snap servers. The company even says an in-app consent notice is added to the application for Illinois residents.
“While we are confident that Lenses do not violate BIPA, out of an abundance of caution and as a testament to our commitment to user privacy, earlier this year we rolled out an in-app consent notice for Snapchatters in Illinois,” Boogaard says.
This is not the first time that BIPA has been challenging tech companies. The law has previously forced Facebook to pay $650 million for a lawsuit regarding its automatic photo-tagging feature. Back in June, Google also agreed to pay $100 million to settle a lawsuit over a face grouping feature in Google Photos. The feature reportedly violated the BIPA act.
2022-08-25 15:08:45