Samsara Dash Cam Lawsuit for Truck Drivers: Were Your Privacy Rights Violated?
Last Updated on February 26, 2024
Investigation Complete
Attorneys working with ClassAction.org have finished their investigation into this matter.
Check back for any potential updates and take a look at our open investigations here. The information on this page is for reference only.
At A Glance
- This Alert Affects:
- Commercial truck drivers who live in Illinois, regularly begin and end their trips in that state, and have had a Samsara AI Dash Cam installed in their truck.
- What’s Going On?
- A lawsuit has been filed claiming that Samsara illegally captured and stored truck drivers’ facial scans through its dashboard cameras without satisfying the requirements of an Illinois privacy law. The attorneys now need more drivers to come forward to help strengthen the litigation.
- How Could a Class Action Lawsuit Help?
- The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act states that consumers may be able to collect $1,000 per violation and as much as $5,000 in cases where the company intentionally or recklessly broke the law.
Attorneys working with ClassAction.org want to hear from truck drivers in Illinois whose commercial vehicles were equipped with a Samsara AI Dash Cam.
A proposed class action lawsuit has been filed against Samsara over allegations that its dash cams—which trucking companies use to monitor their employees for signs of fatigue, distracted driving or other risky behavior—illegally capture and store drivers’ facial scans. Specifically, the case claims the tech company violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by failing to provide certain disclosures or obtain permission before collecting this data from residents.
Under the Illinois BIPA, consumers may be owed $1,000—or up to $5,000 in some cases—per violation.
How Could Facial Scanning Violate Drivers’ Privacy?
Scans of employees’ facial geometry fall under a category of personal information regulated under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). Enacted in 2008, the BIPA is a state-specific law that sets certain standards for how private companies can handle residents’ biometric information—including fingerprints, voiceprints, facial scans, retina scans and more.
The law aims to protect consumers from the serious risks associated with the collection of their biometric data, which, unlike Social Security numbers or other means of identification, cannot be changed once compromised.
Under the BIPA, a company is prohibited from capturing, storing, using or sharing residents’ biometric information unless it first:
- Notifies the individual that their biometric data is being collected, stored or used
- Informs them in writing the specific purpose and length of time for which their biometric data will be collected, stored or used
- Obtains a written release from the individual allowing it to collect, store or use their biometric information
- Publishes a publicly available policy outlining when the biometric information within its possession will be permanently destroyed
According to the lawsuit, Samsara collects, stores and uses truck drivers’ facial scans without adhering to any of the above-mentioned BIPA requirements.
How Could Samsara Be Capturing Drivers’ Facial Scans?
Samsara allegedly captures this information through its dash cams, which the company sells to commercial freight companies for installation in their vehicles.
The complaint claims that the products work by combining dash cam footage of drivers’ faces and “advanced machine learning” to monitor a driver’s behavior. To identify specific drivers, the monitoring systems use facial recognition technology that captures scans of their faces, which are then stored in Samsara’s cloud-based software, the case alleges.
How Could a Lawsuit Help?
A class action lawsuit could provide money to each person affected by Samsara’s alleged privacy violations. It could also force the company to change its data privacy practices.
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