The Lemonade BIPA lawsuit has settled in Illinois, which means I can talk about it now.

The Lemonade BIPA lawsuit has settled in Illinois, which means I can talk about it now.

In 2018, my ex was mugged in Chicago, and I filed a claim on our renter’s insurance, which was Lemonade.

After some back and forth where Lemonade didn’t want to pay anything, I finally got a payment of almost $700 for the things he had stolen from him less the deductible.

What I didn’t know was that Lemonade had stolen my biometric information while I was making the claim video where you have to describe what had happened.

Lemonade was later dumb enough to admit, in a since deleted blog post, that they use “AI” to get your facial information and look for tells that you might be lying. When they got sued, they denied any wrongdoing.

On Facebook later, a law firm called Ahdoot Woolfson, had an ad where they were trying to get lead plaintiffs to initiate a class action lawsuit against Lemonade. I contacted them, and we had a discussion over the phone and then I signed a form stating that they were authorized to represent me on contingency, and then they said they’d get back with me later and never did.

In the mean time, another firm beat them to filing the lawsuit and they told me that we would be working alongside that law firm to pursue the case.

Then I didn’t hear anything. Until I got an email with a unique class member ID the other day stating that the case had been settled with $4 million going to the class and $1 million going to the lawyers.

Since the hearing is in an Illinois courtroom, I can show up an object if I want to, and I might. I filled out a claim anyway so I at least will get something, as the date to object is after the deadline to file a claim.

Recently we got $400 each from a Facebook BIPA settlement and have since filed BIPA claims against Google, which should be paid out later this year.

Some companies have stopped doing business in Illinois entirely due to all of these BIPA lawsuit, but they’re not the companies you want here anyway if you’re one of their victims. Clearview AI was one of them that pulled out, and they do facial recognition that ends up being misused by police agencies and large firms, and the settlement terms are going to give them a hard time doing business anywhere in the country.

There’s been a lot of lobbying to get rid of BIPA or turn it into some sort of a joke, so that Facebook and others can violate you with impunity again. The reason Facebook stopped using facial recognition and deleted it, is because of BIPA. We should expand privacy laws, not allow them to gut it.

Between the California Consumer Privacy Act and the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act, we have the only strong protections in the entire nation.

Microsoft already (says) they apply both laws to anyone using their products. Can you imagine how much worse Microsoft could be without them?

Many companies want the federal government to pass a “privacy” law that doesn’t do anything and effectively repeals all state laws. They turned against one that looks like it might pass when representatives of California and Illinois inserted language that would grandfather the CCPA and BIPA in addition to the privacy protections in the new federal law.

If Congress is going to pass anything, it should at least grandfather these laws and should really allow states to continue passing whatever the elected representatives see fit to, as long as the federal law is a baseline.

The reason why companies have ran into so much trouble in the states and now have different regulatory and employment laws is because they’ve paralyzed Congress and the federal agencies, and while that was going according to their design, the states woke up and started legislating, and now the corporations are mad that they got what they wanted and it’s a mess for them.