A federal judge has certified a class of roughly 22,402 truck drivers who scanned their fingers at Union Pacific gates in Illinois, and refused to grant the railroad summary judgment on claims under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
Judge LaShonda A. Hunt of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois issued the memorandum opinion in Fleury v. Union Pacific Railroad Company, a case brought by drivers David Fleury and Alvin Turner. The certified class covers everyone whose composite fingerprint images or fingerprint templates the railroad obtained in Illinois since December 11, 2014 and before any written consent recorded in company files, with separate subclasses for policy and retention claims. Numerosity was not in dispute.
The technology at issue is an automated gate system installed at the railroad’s Illinois intermodal facilities in 2014 to verify truck drivers entering the yards. It used a Lumidigm finger-scanning device with multispectral imaging, licensed from Nascent Technology through Remprex, which held primary and unlimited access to the gate databases and the finger scan data. Finger scanning ended in 2021 and the system was decommissioned in 2023.
Two defences failed. Union Pacific argued that the sensor read subdermal information from beneath the surface of the finger and therefore produced neither fingerprints nor biometric identifiers within the meaning of the statute, and the court declined to grant summary judgment on that ground. It also rejected the railroad’s reliance on the government contractor exemption, which shields a contractor of a state agency or local government when working for that body. Treating that phrase as a limit on which conduct is covered rather than a statement of timing, the court held the exemption reaches only work performed within the scope of a government contract, and none of Union Pacific’s government contracts concerned the gate system or the finger scanning.
Judge Hunt followed an Illinois appellate ruling in Thomas v. Cornerstone Services and a parallel decision in Payton v. Union Pacific, and declined the railroad’s request to wait for a pending Seventh Circuit appeal in Payton on the same question. The parties were ordered to file a joint status report and appear next month, with the court indicating it expects to set a trial date between March and June 2027.
What a defendant actually holds has decided other cases under the statute. The Seventh Circuit affirmed the dismissal of claims against Samsung after finding the plaintiffs had not shown it possessed face templates generated on users’ own devices, while a federal judge in California ruled that Otter.ai must face voiceprint claims over speaker identification in meeting recordings.
Sources: CourtListener
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
