Home Depot's Self-Checkouts Illegally Gathers Facial Data, Class-Action Alleges
Home Depot's AI-powered system that manages inventory and mitigates theft at self-checkout stations violates the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), said a class-action lawsuit filed Friday. Called Computer Vision, the system uses cameras and machine learning to perform facial recognition and collect customer facial geometry, lead plaintiff Benjamin Jankowski alleged in case 25-09144.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Privacy Daily provides accurate coverage of newsworthy developments in data protection legislation, regulation, litigation, and enforcement for privacy professionals responsible for ensuring effective organizational data privacy compliance.
Since Home Depot utilizes facial recognition technology, "BIPA requires that it: (1) make publicly available written policies containing retention schedules or guidelines for permanently destroying these facial-geometry scans and (2) obtain its customers’ informed, written consent before collecting and disclosing the facial scans," the complaint said. "Home Depot does neither."
Filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois, the suit further alleges that while Home Depot’s Vice President of Asset Protection Scott Glenn said the company "go[es] above and beyond the legal requirements for notification, and ... use[s] the tools only to protect [their] associates, customers, and the shopping experience," it has "failed to satisfy its legal obligations and to respect its customers’ rights to privacy."
Jankowski said a self-checkout at a Home Depot store he visited had "a screen and a camera" and "around his face, in the image around the screen, was a small green box." As such, he argued his "biometric identifiers and/or biometric information -- to wit scans of his facial geometry -- were collected, captured, used, and/or stored by Home Depot during his visit."