Friend Family Health Center Hit with Privacy Class Action in Illinois Over Employee Fingerprint Scanning

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Friend Family Health Center, Inc. faces a proposed class action over its apparent practice of using employees’ fingerprints to track their work hours without first providing proper disclosures and obtaining express written consent to do so.

Alleging violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), the 19-page case claims the defendant’s alleged failures with respect to its data collection practices have exposed employees to “serious and irreversible privacy risks” given their biometric information—i.e., fingerprints—cannot be changed or replaced if compromised.

“There is no realistic way, absent surgery, to reassign someone’s biometric data,” the complaint states. “A person can obtain a new social security number, but not a new hand, which makes the protection of, and control over, biometric identifiers and biometric information particularly important.”

The plaintiff says she worked for Family Health as a certified medical assistant between September and November 2018, a time during which she was required to scan her fingerprint each time she clocked in and out of the defendant’s timekeeping system.

According to the 19-page case, Family Health overstepped the BIPA by collecting the plaintiff’s and other workers’ biometrics without first:

• Informing workers of the specific purpose and length of time for which their fingerprints would be collected, stored, disseminated and used;
• Providing a publicly available retention schedule and guidelines for the permanent destruction of the data; and
• Receiving a written release from employees to collect, store, disseminate or otherwise use their biometric information.

The lawsuit alleges the plaintiff and similarly situated workers have been “continuously and repeatedly exposed” to the risk of identity theft and fraud without being properly informed of how the defendant uses their information and how long it will be retained.

The plaintiff says she would never have provided her biometric data to Family Health had she known it would be retained “for an indefinite period of time without her consent.”

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