

Attorney Katrina Carroll has filed a class action lawsuit against an online photo company for allegedly keeping users private information. | Lite DePalma Greenberg, LLC

CHICAGO (Legal Newsline) - A popular online photo sharing company is being sued for allegedly storing sensitive information of non-users of its website.

Brian Norberg filed the lawsuit on June 17 in United States District Court in Illinois against Shutterfly claiming the company stores “biometric identifiers” from photos of individuals on its website.

Biometric identifiers can contain sensitive information such as fingerprints or “face geometry,” the suit says. It also claims Shutterfly has “collected and stored millions of 'face templates'” from individuals through the photos on its website. Many of those it has pictures of are not users of Shutterfly, the lawsuit said.

“(Shutterfly) creates these templates using sophisticated facial recognition technology that extracts and analyzes data from the points and contours of faces appearing in photos uploaded by their users,” the lawsuit said. “Each face template is unique to a particular individual, in the same way that a fingerprint or voiceprint uniquely identifies one and only one person.”

The lawsuit said Shutterfly's action violate Illinois state law when dealing with biometric identifiers.

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The lawsuit is seeking class action status in the case, and is also seeking more than $5 million in damages plus court costs.

Norberg is represented by Katrina Carroll and Kyle A. Shamberg of Lite DePalma Greenberg, LLC in Chicago; and David P. Milian and Frank S. Hedin of Carey Rodriguez O'Keefe Milian Gonya, LLP in Miami.

United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois case number 1:15-cv-05351.