The Senate passed legislation on April 11th making important reforms to the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).
The bill, SB 2979, was in response to an Illinois Supreme Court ruling last year—Cothron v. White Castle System, Inc.—that each separate incident of unauthorized biometric collection or transmission was a separate violation under the act and subject to individual damages.
SB 2979 specifies that this would no longer be the case and that repeat violations involving the same individual and biometric information would be considered only one violation.
The bill lacks specific language, however, to make these changes retroactive and protect companies that may have violated the statute’s current provisions in the past—a change sought by the state’s business community.
