Overview
- A federal judge certified three Illinois classes in June and the Seventh Circuit denied Apple’s request for an immediate appeal on June 30, 2026, so the consolidated suit will continue in the Southern District of Illinois.
- Plaintiffs say Apple Photos’ People feature generates numeric “faceprints” from images without written consent and that some of those vectors have been synced or stored server-side for affected users.
- Apple argues the Photos algorithms run on-device, use numerical vectors that cannot recreate a face or identify a person, and insists it cannot access users’ raw photo data.
- Under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act plaintiffs seek statutory damages of $1,000 per negligent violation or $5,000 per intentional or reckless violation, which the complaint says could total about $32.5 billion for roughly 6.5 million class members.
- The case now returns to district court for merits briefing where plaintiffs must prove BIPA violations and any intent or recklessness for enhanced penalties and where the outcome could shape how on-device processing and cloud sync are treated under biometric privacy law.