White Castle collecting burger slingers' fingerprints looks like a $17B mistake

If an actual alternative has to be provided, that's a very sensible law. Biometrics can't be revoked, and every use puts them at risk, so making sure people aren't forced to let employers collect their biometrics is a good idea.

Edit: If I read it right, the "consent" is required in the pure paperwork sense, unfortunately. That means for employees it only prevents biometrics from being used covertly.

However, it still has value for non-employees, and the "written" aspect is particularly important here. A supermarket for example can't use biometrics to track people for advertising or theft protection purposes, because they'd first need to stop them at the entrance so they can sign a waiver. No cheating out of it with a small sticker "by entering these premises, you consent" in some corner.

This is like no-competes or binding arbitration agreements. If you decline to sign, your rights were honored, and you're free to find a job elsewhere.

Illinois also prohibits employment discrimination based on opting out.

There are numerous vendors offering an Illinois-compliant fingerprint timekeeping system. That’s what’s so crazy about this.

You don't impose the death penalty for stealing an orange.

With corporations the point of a penalty is to deter, not destroy.

If White Castle goes out of business and thousands of people lose their jobs, how is that good for society?

Justice requires proportionality.

Reading the bill it even points this out.

Biometrics are unlike other unique identifiers that are used to access finances or other sensitive information. For example, social security numbers, when compromised, can be changed. Biometrics, however, are biologically unique to the individual; therefore, once compromised, the individual has no recourse, is at heightened risk for identity theft, and is likely to withdraw from biometric-facilitated transactions.

1. Biometrics can't be revoked, so if your gym leaks your fingerprint images (linked to your name), that's a mistake that in practice simply cannot be fixed. You just can't use that finger for sensitive biometrics ever again. People should not be forced to take the risk.

2. It's hard to distinguish between biometric surveillance and "good" uses of biometrics, and they can fluently blend into each other. The law draws a rather clear line and has to enforce it.

Should a company be allowed to use biometrics to make sure you don't let your brother sub in for you? Preventing fraud like that is a noble goal, but how far do we want to allow pervasive biometric surveillance to go? Should stadium owners be allowed to ban people? Should they be allowed to ban all employees of a law firm they don't like? Should they be allowed to surveil everyone's faces with a biometric system for this purpose?

The lines between "perfectly reasonable" to "Black Mirror dystopia" are fluent, and the way there consists of many steps that individually seem reasonable (preventing crime is good, right?) and yet the outcome is something we don't want. This is why the law exists, this is why it also hits some "legitimate" uses, and this is why consent (if implemented meaningfully, in the voluntary, GDPR style sense, not in the "you have to sign here or you will be excluded from normal life" sense) is such a powerful tool: It generally lets the harmless stuff happen and prevents the dystopia.

It's optional on the devices you mention. It's not a requirement. In the court case, there was no way for an employee to opt out, short of quitting.

My company (about 2,000 employees) issues iPhones to its employees. You are given a choice of face scanning or fingerprint scanning device. You do not have to use either method: you can choose a suitably long PIN, instead.

If you choose to use biometric access, HR send your a 15-page document to sign, and you have to take an online course about biometric privacy.

I think if more companies did that, society wouldn't be so casual with giving away their biometric data.

All three indicates a type of person that should be protected from random idiocy of an employer. It is not often that I praise IL for anything, but the biometric law is one of those few instances.

They constantly tell me to simply things because “these guys aren’t very smart”.

To the point that (on top of other problems) they’re creating foolishly simple logins…

I thought about finger print reading but the legal questions make me second guess it.

I see how it's convenient but personally I wouldn't use biometrics here, sounds like an obvious avenue to get your biometrics leaked.

MacOS unlocking is different like others have pointed out already.

The IT person who decided to adopt it would have needed it to occur to them to check with legal. And I can imagine that for most people it wouldn't occur to them. Any more than you'd think to check with legal about whether a password should require at least one punctuation character.

I'm not defending White Castle here but neither do I think it's anywhere close to "reckless". I think it was just a normal day to day IT decision that nobody thought anything of.

In other words, there was probably no criminal intent here nor recklessness. Just ignorance of a relatively unknown statute, that sure you should pay a reasonable fine for. Not a big deal.

Especially considering we are talking about a sandwich shop, not Google or AWS.

Maybe: requiring fingerprint to access your pay is effectively coercion.

Reasons the employees might not consent but still go through with the fingerprinting.

- Every other employer mysteriously started doing the same thing as their owned by the same franchise owner and/or their friends.

- There are no other employers.

- You live paycheck to paycheck and can't just quit a job.

- Commuting to a different site would increase your gas bill.

- The extra .25 that BK pays is necessary for you to live.

That's an extreme, but you get the point. When the law says get consent, it clearly means there is none implied by participation. Even if the employee signs a paper on their own volition granting consent, your inability or refusal to obtain that consent makes you a violator of the law because as far as you know and can prove in court, your finger print collection was being done without you specifically knowing about that employee's consent. It is your state of mind and intent that is a violation of the law .

This comes across as a pretty privileged take. For many fast-food workers, a few things are true:

* They have no money or other job opportunities

* They have a legal requirement to work (parole, child support, rehab)

* The local franchise operator is influential and owns multiple franchises

* Already owed pay (and already spent pay) are locked behind these barriers

* The average fast food worker doesn't have education or resources to challenge them

It absolutely is coercion, and another arm of corporatism.

1. https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/documents/074000140K15...

2. https://ilcourtsaudio.blob.core.windows.net/antilles-resourc...

Informed consent? Absolutely not. People here are arguing that the poor white collar employees and execs of White Castle couldn't possibly be expected to understand the nuances of installing fingerprint readers. So how could minimum wage workers, many of them minors, be expected to understand the issues at play?

Perhaps the person didn't know Illinois had a biometric privacy law? Imagine you're company has been making you do something you hate for years, then you discover it's illegal. You'd absolutely want to sue, and to have lost that right because you waited is unjustified.

B. The service that shall not be named is probably infiltrating more journalistic output than we think without us noticing. So attractive when you're overworked... (also notice the short paragraphs the article and the service share)

C. As for the lawyers... they don't want "annihilative liability" and are doing everything they can to prevent such an outcome.

In this case, they’re alleging every finger scan violates consent while White Castle says they should settle with the initial scan violated consent -once per employee.

If the initial suit was for a more modest sum and a more modest allegation, White Castle may never have even considered admitting fault. I agree though, that we need laws with teeth so big companies can’t consider it a cost of doing business. The 17B number could wipe out many businesses entirely. Maybe they should. Chapter 11 protects the economy and jobs by ensuring the organization could still run, just with shareholders losing out.

For a company over 100 years old with 10,000 employees? I suspect the answer is their compliance department.

Option one is what I would call a reorganization: the rights of equity holders are terminated, and creditors (which would include beneficiaries of civil judgements) get some fraction of what they are owed, through a combination of keeping some portion of their existing claims, receiving cash received from selling new stock, and receiving some amount of new stock. Crucially, the business keeps operating when this happens, it's really just reorganizing the capital structure, not doing much to actual business operations.

Option two is a true liquidation: the business stops operating, all of its assets are sold, and the proceeds distributed to creditors and then the corporate entity simply ceases to exist.

The original debate about the "corporate death penalty" arose from how Arthur Anderson was treated in the wake of the Enron scandal. In that case, AA was criminally indicted. A criminal conviction is a huge problem for a public accounting firm, because convicted felons can't be CPAs or audit public companies. Indeed, it was ultimately convicted and barred by the SEC from auditing public companies. But it actually collapsed far before that, basically immediately after the indictment, as all of its clients saw the writing on the wall and dropped them. This was an option 2 liquidation.

Personally, I would only consider an option 2 liquidation the "corporate death penalty". In the case of your friend in the railroad business, it's probably not the socially optimal outcome because you would actually get more money for the victims through an option 1 reorganization than option 2 liquidation. In general that's why option 2 should be sparingly applied: it reduces the resources available to compensate victims, and inflicts collateral damage on employees, vendors, and customers who mostly didn't do anything wrong.

In addition to option 1 and option 2, some people also consider simply indicting a corporation as the "corporate death penalty" because of how in the case of Arthur Anderson, the criminal indictment did pretty much immediately cause option 2. I think that that position is not really consistent with the facts, however. There are at least 54 publicly traded companies that received criminal convictions between 2001 and 2010; 37 of them were still around in 2013, only 5 failed, and of the 5 it doesn't really seem like the conviction had much to do with their demise[0].

[0] https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...