‘Top Chef’ Champion’s Restaurant Hit with Class Action Over Alleged Biometric Privacy Violations

New to ClassAction.org? Read our Newswire Disclaimer

A proposed class action lawsuit alleges Chicago’s Little Goat Diner, owned by “Top Chef” season four winner and Iron Chef Stephanie Izard, has unlawfully captured and stored employee fingerprint scans without consent.

Want to stay in the loop on class actions that matter to you? Sign up for ClassAction.org’s free weekly newsletter here.

The eight-page lawsuit claims Izard’s restaurant has breached the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by capturing and storing workers’ fingerprint scans without express written authorization. The suit also accuses the diner of failing to disclose how long and for what purpose employees’ sensitive biometric information would be kept and when it would be destroyed.

According to the suit, the restaurant requires employees to scan their fingerprints when punching in and out of work for timekeeping and shift attendance purposes. Employees are identified by the “reference templates” stored in the database, which are purportedly created by converting workers’ initial fingerprint scans into “algorithmic representations of the minutiae points of the fingerprint,” the case explains. After creating the reference templates, the defendant used them to recognize workers who scanned their fingerprints and track their shifts, the complaint relays.

High-profile companies like Facebook and Google have publicly run afoul of the BIPA in recent years, and as the filing says, the privacy law is “well known [sic], and its obligations clear.” Thus, the restaurant should have understood the BIPA’s requirements, the suit argues.

The plaintiff, an Illinois resident and former employee at Little Goat Diner, never consented to the collection and storage of his biometric data, nor was he ever informed why or for how long the restaurant would keep the information, or if it would be permanently destroyed, the case claims.

The lawsuit looks to represent anyone identified in Little Goat Diner’s biometric database at any time since February 8, 2018.

Get class action lawsuit news sent to your inbox – sign up for ClassAction.org’s free weekly newsletter here.