United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 20-3249 MELISSA THORNLEY, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. CLEARVIEW AI, INC., Defendant-Appellant. ____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 20-cv-3843 — Sharon Johnson Coleman, Judge. ____________________

ARGUED JANUARY 4, 2021 — DECIDED JANUARY 14, 2021 ____________________

Before EASTERBROOK, WOOD, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges. WOOD, Circuit Judge. Illinois’s Biometric Information Pri- vacy Act, familiarly known as BIPA, provides robust protec- tions for the biometric information of Illinois residents. See 740 ILCS 14/1 et seq. It does so by regulating the collection, retention, disclosure, and destruction of biometric identifiers or information—for example, retinal scans, fingerprints, or fa- cial geometry. In recent years, the use of biometric data has 2 No. 20-3249 exploded. Predictably, that development has been followed by a spate of litigation testing the limits of the law’s protec- tions. Not all of those cases, however, have proven to be justi- ciable in federal court: some plaintiffs have failed to demon- strate that they have standing to sue as required by Article III of the Constitution. The question now before us is whether, on the allegations of the operative complaint, the plaintiffs—Melissa Thornley and others, on behalf of themselves and a proposed class— have shown standing. (For convenience, we refer only to Thornley, unless the context requires otherwise.) Oddly, Thornley insists that she lacks standing, and it is the defend- ant, Clearview AI, Inc., that is championing her right to sue in federal court. That peculiar line-up exists for reasons that only a civil procedure buff could love: the case started out in an Illinois state court, but Clearview removed it to federal court. Thornley wants to return to state court to litigate the BIPA claims, but Clearview prefers a federal forum. The case may stay in federal court, however, only if the more stringent fed- eral standards for standing can be satisfied; Illinois (as is its right) has a more liberal attitude toward the kinds of cases its courts are authorized to entertain. The district court held that Thornley has alleged only a bare statutory violation, not the kind of concrete and particularized harm that would support standing, and thus ordered the action remanded to the state court. Because the case meets the criteria of the Class Action Fairness Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1332(d), Clearview sought permis- sion to appeal from that order. See 28 U.S.C. § 1453(c). We agreed to take the appeal, § 1453(c)(1), and we now affirm the decision of the district court. No. 20-3249 3

I Our description of the factual background of the case is necessarily brief because we have only the pleadings before us. We accept Thornley’s account for present purposes. Clear- view is in a business that would have been impossible to im- agine a generation ago. Founded in 2017, it designed a facial recognition tool that takes advantage of the enormous amount of information that floats around the Internet. Users may download an application (“App”) that gives them access to Clearview’s database. Clearview uses a proprietary algorithm to “scrape” pic- tures from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Insta- gram, LinkedIn, and Venmo. The materials that it uses are all publicly available. The scraping process is not designed, how- ever, simply to store photographs. Instead, Clearview’s soft- ware harvests from each scraped