Smarte Carte Class Action: Rentals Collect Data Without Consent

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Smarte Carte faces a proposed class action lawsuit that accuses the company of unlawfully collecting customers’ biometric data.

Plaintiff Adina McCollough says Smarte Carte uses a biometric data collection system to scan customers’ fingerprints without their written consent and without the disclosure of information required by Illinois state law.

Smarte Carte provides conveniences like self-serve vended luggage carts and rentable lockers in public facilities like airports, malls and train stations. According to McCollough’s description, since about 2008 Smarte Carte has been using lockers in Illinois that scan the customer’s fingerprint and uses that fingerprint as an electronic key.

The plaintiff says she used lockers like these five times during 2015, when she traveled through Union Station in Chicago.

According to McCollough’s class action lawsuit, Smarte Carte failed to follow Illinois state legal requirements for the collection of biometric data, like fingerprints. She argues Smarte Carte’s fingerprint-scanning lockers violate several provisions of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA.

Under BIPA, McCollough says Smarte Carte is under an obligation to inform its customers in writing that it collects their biometric identifier. The company may not collect that identifier without a written release executed by the subject of the identifier or that person’s legal representative, she says.

The plaintiff further states that the company is required to disclose what it will do with customers’ biometric identifiers after the current transaction. She says Smarte Carte must tell its customers in writing how long their biometric information will be stored and must have a publicly available written policy stating when the company will permanently destroy that information.

McCollough says none of these requirements were met when she rented her Smarte Carte lockers. She alleges that at no point during any of these transactions was she prompted to give consent to the collection of her biometric data, and she maintains she never consented in writing to that collection. Neither was McCollough offered disclosure of the purposes for which Smarte Carte was collecting her data, how long the company would store it, or when it would be destroyed, she says.

What’s more, Smarte Carte benefitted financially from its alleged violations of BIPA, claims McCollough. She says that the company enjoys lower labor and operating costs by using lockers that neglect BIPA requirements rather than using a physical key.

McCollough seeks to represent a Class of plaintiffs consisting of “[a]ll users of Smarte Carte’s lockers fingerprinted by Smarte Carte in the State of Illinois.”

She is asking the court for a monetary award to cover all applicable damages, restitution, reimbursement of attorneys’ fees and costs of litigation. McCollough is also seeking injunctive relief in the form of an order requiring Smarte Carte to publicly disclose a written policy for its use of biometric data, whether it has retained or destroyed customer’s biometric data, and whether it has unlawfully profited from the sale or trade of that data.

The plaintiff is represented by Mark A. Bulgarelli and Ilan Chorowsky, both of Progressive Law Group LLC.

The Smarte Carte Biometric Data Collection Class Action Lawsuit is McCollough v. Smarte Carte Inc., Case No. 16-CV-3777 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.