Apple is once again at the center of a major class action fight, and this one could carry an unusually large price tag. According to the report, an Illinois lawsuit is seeking as much as $5,000 for each affected user, which could add up to $32.5 billion if the claims were successful across the full group of 6.5 million residents.
The case focuses on Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, a state law passed in 2008 to limit how companies handle sensitive identifiers such as fingerprints, voiceprints, iris scans, and faceprints. The lawsuit argues that Apple’s Photos app uses facial recognition to analyze pictures in a user’s library, create a faceprint, and identify people without first getting the written consent required by the law. Plaintiffs also claim that because Photos can sync across devices, some of that biometric information is stored on Apple’s servers rather than staying only on a user’s device.
The lawsuit is organized into several groups. One covers Illinois users whose devices placed a photo of them into a People album from September 13, 2016 through today. Another applies to users with a People album tagged with their name or another identifier and an enabled iCloud photo account during that same period. A third group is narrower, covering users with devices running iOS 17.6, iPadOS 17.6, or macOS Sonoma 14.6 or later, plus at least 5,000 photos and videos in iCloud Photo Library, from March 25, 2025 through today.
Apple has pushed back and asked for the case to be dismissed. The company says its Photos privacy protections comply with Illinois law, arguing that the raw biometric data cannot be used to reconstruct a face or connect it to a person’s identity. Apple also says it cannot access users’ Photos data and that facial recognition happens locally on each device, not through a shared system that carries over the underlying recognition data between devices. The dispute is not new, either; according to the report, the case was originally filed in March.
Source: lifehacker.com
