Fast-food chain Wendy’s will pay some of its current and former workers hundreds of dollars each after it agreed to settle a class action lawsuit that alleged the company collected their biometrics without following the privacy regulations it was bound to by Illinois law.
At the heart of the issue, according to those who brought the class action against Wendy’s, is that the company collected some employees’ biometric data without first obtaining their informed written consent, according to the lawsuit’s settlement website.
The biometric data in question was some employees’ fingerprints, which were obtained through a finger-scanning point-of-sale (POS) system. This collection amounted to a breach of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which came into law in October 2008.