A federal appeals court has affirmed the dismissal of a biometric privacy lawsuit against Samsung, ruling that the plaintiffs did not plausibly allege the company possessed or collected face templates created and stored on users’ devices.
The case concerned Samsung Gallery’s face-grouping feature. The software scans photographs saved on a device, generates a template representing each detected face and groups images that appear to show the same person. The plaintiffs alleged that this process violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
In an opinion issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, the three-judge panel assumed without deciding that the Gallery templates could qualify as biometric identifiers or information under BIPA. The case instead turned on whether Samsung itself possessed, collected, captured or obtained the data.
The court found that those terms require some form of company control over the information. Allegations that Samsung designed the software and provided the device were insufficient because the templates remained locally stored and under the user’s control.
The plaintiffs also pointed to Samsung’s cloud services and privacy language stating that the company may collect biometric information. The panel found that they had not alleged their templates were actually uploaded or accessed by Samsung, and that a general statement about possible collection did not establish control over the data at issue.
The decision distinguishes an on-device biometric function from a service that transmits templates to a provider’s servers. That distinction is increasingly important as smartphones perform more face and fingerprint processing locally, allowing biometric features to operate without sending the underlying template to the company that developed the software.
The ruling follows earlier procedural disputes in Samsung biometric litigation. The Seventh Circuit previously rejected an effort to compel arbitration in a related BIPA case, while Samsung had challenged an arbitration order in separate proceedings.
The new opinion does not hold that on-device face templates fall outside BIPA. It establishes that plaintiffs seeking relief under the statute must plausibly connect the defendant to control or acquisition of the biometric data, rather than relying only on the defendant’s role in creating the software.
The panel affirmed the Northern District of Illinois judgment dismissing the complaint. Judges Thomas Kirsch II, Michael Brennan and Doris Pryor Lee heard the appeal, with Lee writing the opinion.
Sources: U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
