Ill. Supreme Court Makes Landmark Decision in Six Flags Privacy Class Action

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On Friday, the Illinois Supreme Court decided that Six Flags indeed violated the state’s biometric privacy laws by obtaining fingerprints from visitors without collecting legally-required permission.

This ruling may have a far-reaching effect as more than 200 similar class actions are pending in Illinois state courts.

This decision reversed an appeal court’s ruling to side with Six Flags who claimed that since the plaintiff had not been harmed by the company’s collection of fingerprints, she should not be able to seek compensation.

Specifically, Six Flags attempted to defend itself against the fingerprinting class action lawsuit by arguing that the plaintiff, a mother whose son was fingerprinted upon his visit to the park, had not suffered actual harm from the company’s failure to ask her permission to fingerprint her son, and therefore should not be able to seek compensation.

However, the Illinois Supreme Court disagreed, stating that Six Flags had incorrectly interpreted Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act.

The law protects individuals’ privacy by limiting how and when biometric information, like fingerprints, face scans, and genetic information, can be collected. The BIPA requires companies to receive consent before collecting this type of information.

According to the court, the act is intended to be a preventative measure that guards individuals’ privacy against invasion in the first place, so to require individuals to prove that they had actually been harmed by having their information collected without their consent would undercut the intention of the law and inhibit the law’s ability to prevent harm.

Instead, the Illinois Supreme Court determined that people only had to show that a violation of the law had been committed against them in order to seek damages. In other words, the court determined that a statutory damages needed to be shown, not actual damages, to bring a claim forward.

In support of this decision, the court pointed to the fact that other Illinois statues that did require an individual to show actual damages to seek compensation explicitly noted this in the laws themselves.

According to the court, no such stipulation exists in the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, so Six Flags’ reading of the law was inaccurate.

This court decision may affect more than 200 BIPA class action lawsuits filed in Illinois accusing restaurants, airlines, and even Facebook of violating the privacy law.

The Six Flags biometric privacy violation class action lawsuit was filed by Stacy Rosenbach in 2016. Rosenbach claimed that she purchased a Six Flags ticket for her son who later went to the amusement park on a school trip.

Rosenbach says that during his trip, her son was required to give his fingerprint and other biometric information to access his ticket.

The Six Flags fingerprinting class action lawsuit argues that Rosenbach was not notified in advance that her son’s fingerprint would be taken, and that she did not give her consent for his fingerprint to be taken. Allegedly, this represented a violation of Illinois privacy law.

The Illinois Supreme Court’s decision on Friday represents a reversal of the ruling made in 2017 by the state appeals court that said consumers have to show actual injury was caused by a violation of the Biometric Privacy Act to bring claims forward under the law.

Rosenbach is represented by Phillip Bock and David Oppenheim of Bock Hatch Lewis & Oppenheim LLC and Ilan Chorowsky and Mark Bulgarelli of Progressive Law Group LLC.

The Six Flags Fingerprinting Class Action Lawsuit is Stacy Rosenbach v. Six Flags Entertainment Corp., et al., Case No. 123186, in the Supreme Court of Illinois.