Partners Nicola Menaldo, James Snell, and Rebecca Engrav were quoted in “With Biometrics, Technology’s Doubled-Edged Nature Is on Full Display,” an article in Above the Law, regarding the growing biometric industry and its pandemic-specific uses.

“The pandemic accelerated an already booming biometric industry as the technology becomes more readily available, more useful, and more popular,” said Nicola, who defends clients in litigation and counsels them in areas including biometrics, scraping and web crawling, and artificial intelligence.

Keeping up with the law is not without its challenges. Biometrics are at the center of a lot of legal wrangling. One problem is that the definition varies from law to law, according to James, faculty chair for the Practising Law Institute’s Twenty-Second Annual Institute on Privacy and Cybersecurity Law, coming in May.

The law available to the FTC was Section 5 of the FTC Act. So, the FTC’s “consent order against Everalbum just proceeds under its general unfair and deceptive business practices authority,” Rebecca explained. She said that “using its general Section 5 authority is normal for the FTC when encountering new technologies, but what is curious is that in the Everalbum consent order, the FTC crafted out of whole cloth a definition for the term ‘biometric information.’ It defined this concept as ‘data that depicts or describes the physical or biological traits of an identified or identifiable person, … including images.’”