Google users to get about $95 each in biometric settlement
More than 687,000 current and former Illinois residents who filed claims for a cut of Google’s $100 million biometric privacy class-action settlement can expect to see payouts of about $95 each.
Any person who appeared in a photograph in Google Photos between May 1, 2015, and April 25, 2022, while they were an Illinois resident was eligible to submit a claim for a piece of the settlement. The deadline to file a claim was last September.
In a May 31 court filing, attorneys for the class said payouts would be around $95 per person. At a hearing Friday, Cook County Circuit Judge Anna Loftus said the process of verifying claims filed in the case had been completed to her satisfaction and that the class had been identified in its entirety.
The Google settlement is one of a number of high-profile settlements in recent years over alleged violations of Illinois’ strict biometric privacy law; other companies that have been caught in the law’s crosshairs include Facebook and Snapchat parent Snap Inc. The law prohibits companies from collecting or saving biometric information without prior consent.
The Google case centered around the company’s face grouping tool, which sorts faces in the Google Photos app by similarity.
“We’re pleased to resolve this matter relating to specific laws in Illinois, and we remain committed to building easy-to-use controls for our users,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement.
Google did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which it reached more than a year ago. At the time, attorneys for class members estimated that payouts could be as high as $200 to $400 per person.
The original estimates put potential payouts closer to the dollar amounts sent out to class members last year in the landmark Facebook biometric privacy settlement, for which class members received checks of nearly $400 in addition to supplemental payments of about $30 after some class members failed to cash their first checks.
But Facebook settled its privacy case, which centered around its facial tagging feature, for a total of $650 million, more than six times the amount of the Google settlement.
When she issued final approval of the settlement last fall, Loftus said about 420,000 claims had been deemed valid, putting estimated payouts around $154 per person. That decrease in estimated check size came despite Loftus reducing attorneys’ fees from 40% of the settlement fund to 35%.
Since the final approval hearing, the total number of validated claims has risen to about 687,000.
Two verification campaigns were carried out for claims deemed potentially fraudulent. The second verification campaign identified an additional 159,085 valid claims after concerns were raised in court about the effectiveness of the first verification campaign.
In December, attorneys for the Edelson law firm in Chicago, which did not represent plaintiffs in the case, alleged in court documents that the first verification campaign to validate or deny claims deemed possibly fraudulent was insufficient. The attorneys alleged “most” of the verification emails had ended up in class members’ spam folders.
“If the settlement administrator is allowed to carry out this plan, an enormous number of class members will have their claims denied solely because they do not check their spam folder on Thanksgiving,” the filing read.
Attorneys for the class pushed back against the motion in court filings, saying the settlement had been targeted by bots and that approving potentially fraudulent claims would “severely prejudice bona fide claimants by dramatically reducing their recoveries, while rewarding fraudsters with tens of millions of dollars.”
In April, Loftus ordered a second set of verification emails sent out to people whose claims had not yet been approved or denied. For those whose claims had not yet been approved or denied, the deadline to submit verification in the former of a photo ID or text code was May 27.
In a statement, class counsel attorney Robert Ahdoot said plaintiffs had implemented “a thorough and comprehensive notice and claims program, including common sense methods to protect class members’ interests from those who filed fraudulent claims.”
“After years of hard work, plaintiffs and class counsel reached a historic settlement that provides $100 million to the class and overhauls the way Google handles biometric information in Google Photos,” Ahdoot said.
The Biometric Information Privacy Act, which the state legislature passed in 2008, requires companies to gain consent before they collect and store biometric information such as fingerprints or retina scans. It’s considered one of the strictest such laws in the country, in part because it allows individuals to sue over alleged violations.
In February, the Illinois Supreme Court issued a much-anticipated opinion that left the door open to massive damages in biometric privacy cases.
In a case involving fingerprint scanners used by employees of the fast-food chain White Castle, the court ruled that damages under the law accrue each and every time a person provides their biometric information without prior informed consent, rather than only the first time they do so.
In the split decision, the majority acknowledged their reading of the statute opened the door to potentially massive damages in privacy cases and suggested the legislature revisit the language of the law. Business and trade groups sounded alarms that the ruling could devastate businesses in Illinois, while privacy advocates maintained the law was functioning as intended.
State legislators introduced bills that would have altered BIPA during the spring legislative session in Springfield but did not pass any amendments to the law.