Hair Color Tool Not About Faces, Says Madison Reed, in Motion to Dismiss BIPA Case
A hair color software tool doesn’t implicate faces “and therefore does not implicate” the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act,” said defendant Madison Reed in a Thursday memorandum of law in support of its motion to dismiss a privacy case (docket…
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4:23-cv-04039) in U.S. District Court for Central Illinois in Rock Island. Plaintiff Holly Goodell sued the hair care company in March for lacking a publicly available written policy showing a retention schedule and guidelines for permanently destroying biometric identifiers and information used for its virtual try-on feature (see 2303130008). In February 2021, Goodell used the Madison Reed feature on her iPhone to try different hair color products. The augmented reality technology captured and collected her face geometry data, but the website didn’t inform her how long it would store or use that data, the complaint said; she doesn’t know if it will be permanently deleted. “As technology becomes more sophisticated, so must courts,” said Madison Reed, saying as litigation proliferates in the digital age, lawsuits will demand “careful attention” to underlying technology for plausibility determinations. The company’s hair color tool “is not concerned with the face,” it said, and hair “is intuitively not a biometric identifier.” Plaintiff’s claims are subject to “mandatory individual arbitration,” the defendant said, citing a hyperlink on its website spelling out its privacy policy, located directly below its terms hyperlink at the bottom of the homepage. “The terms unambiguously require individual arbitration claims against Madison Reed,” it said.