The parent firm of Snapchat, Snap, reportedly 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.
Before November 5, Illinois citizens who are qualified to receive a portion of this $35 million can file their claim on this website . Naturally, they shouldn’t anticipate getting their checks any time soon because the deal must first gain final court approval.
Advertisement Residents of Illinois receive compensation for suing Snap Illinois is one of the top states when it comes to data privacy, with strict legislation protecting citizen data. Snap was forced to pay $35 million under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) for their data collection methods. Illinois government and citizens have the right to object to any business or application under the BIPA statute.
Snap claims has never broken the BIPA, and they don’t even engage in facial identification or gather biometric information that can be used to identify a specific person. According to Pete Boogaard, a spokesperson for Snap, the Snapchat lenses only analyze 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.
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.
Advertisement It’s not the first time that BIPA has criticized tech firms. Facebook was previously ordered by the law to pay $650 million to settle a dispute over its automatic photo-tagging tool. Google additionally consented to pay $100 million to resolve a lawsuit in June regarding a face grouping function in Google Photos. The BIPA legislation allegedly was broken by the feature.
