Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) has become the latest company to face a biometric data lawsuit involving employee fingerprint use in Illinois.On June 27, plaintiff Eric Zepeda filed a putative class action lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court against IHG and its subsidiary, the Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group, claiming the company, which employs hundreds of workers at numerous hotels and resort properties in Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois, should be made to pay for allegedly violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA.)According to the lawsuit, Zepeda is an Illinois resident who “has worked at one of (IHG's) hotels in the Chicago area.”Zepeda is represented in the action by attorneys Evan M. Meyers, David L. Gerbie and William P. Kingston, of the McGuire Law P.C., of Chicago.In his lawsuit, Zepeda and his counsel assert IHG and Kimpton have violated for the last three years the Illinois BIPA law, which governs how people and organizations can obtain and use certain biometric identifiers, including fingerprints, facial scans and more.In this case, Zepeda alleges IHG and Kimpton ran afoul of the law in 2014 when the company shifted from a worker time keeping system which had involved worker identification cards and punch codes to a system which required employees to scan their fingerprints to punch in at the beginning of their shifts, and out for required breaks and at the end of their shifts.”Defendants' new system ensures that workers can only verify their attendance and timeliness through scanning their fingerprints,” the lawsuit said.According to the lawsuit, Zepeda alleges the company never properly obtained employees' consent to obtain and use their fingerprints, as required by BIPA, nor did they disclose to employees how their fingerprints would be stored or used, whether and how the information would be shared with third party vendors and others, or how the company planned to ultimately dispose of the biometric information.The BIPA has been a source of lawsuits over biometric data involving numerous firms, including Google, Facebook, and Snapchat.Earlier this month, a former Mariano's employee also accused the grocer of mishandling medical testing equipment also said the company improperly stores its employees' biometric data.
Intercontinental Hotels facing biometric lawsuit
