Saratoga Food Specialties Hit with Privacy Class Action Over Illinois Employee Fingerprint Scans

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A proposed class action claims Smithfield Packaged Meats Corp. has violated an Illinois privacy law by scanning workers’ fingerprints without first providing proper disclosures and obtaining consent to do so.

According to the lawsuit, the defendant, who does business as Saratoga Food Specialties, has required workers to scan their fingerprints to clock in and out of its timekeeping system while failing to provide written notice of its intention to collect their biometric information, publish a retention schedule detailing how long their data will be kept, and obtain written consent to capture their biometric data. 

Per the case, the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) requires all entities who collect residents’ biometric information, such as fingerprints, to meet these strict disclosure and retention requirements before doing so. The failure to do so, according to the suit, exposes employees to serious privacy risks:

Employees whose biometric information has been collected have “a right to know of such risks” and a right to know how long those risks will continue after the end of their employment, the case says.

The lawsuit claims Saratoga Food Specialties has since May 2016 required workers at its Bolingbrook, Illinois production facility to scan their fingerprints to clock into its timekeeping system. According to the suit, the workers were never informed of the purpose and specific length of time for which their biometric information was being collected and did not provide written consent allowing the defendant to collect their information. Moreover, Saratoga failed to publish a publicly available retention schedule and guidelines for when the workers’ data would be permanently destroyed, the suit claims.

“Defendant’s practices of collecting, storing and using individuals’ biometric identifiers (specifically, fingerprints) and associated biometric information without informed written consent violated all three prongs of [the BIPA],” the complaint states.

The lawsuit, which was removed to Illinois’ Northern District Court on April 4 after its initial filing in Will County Circuit Court, looks to represent anyone who had their fingerprints collected, captured, received or otherwise obtained or stored by the defendant in Illinois for timekeeping purposes or a COVID-19 health screening.

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