The following March 3 blog post inspired the Law360 article, “Challenging Personal Jurisdiction In Online Conduct Cases,” published on March 24, 2017. See full article below.

Earlier this week, Judge Edmond Chang of the Northern District of Illinois rejected Google’s arguments that application of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) to facial geometry scanning by Google Photos is, on its face, an improper extraterritorial application of Illinois law. See Rivera v. Google, Inc., Case No. 16-cv-22714, Docket Entry 60.  Faced with Google’s arguments that the claims would require extraterritorial application of the statute and/or would violate the Dormant Commerce Clause by reaching beyond state boundaries, the court essentially punted, saying that “[d]iscovery is needed to determine whether there are legitimate extraterritoriality concerns.” Id. at p. 22.  The court also rejected Google’s argument that BIPA does not cover facial geometry scans pulled from photographs.
Continue Reading Biometric Data Claims against Google Survive – But What about Personal Jurisdiction?