By Mike Swift ( August 27, 2026, 23:24 GMT | Insight) -- Apple told a federal judge in East St. Louis, Illinois, that because data that can be used to group similar faces is fully encrypted after it leaves a user's device, its iPhone Photos app couldn't have violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. A lawyer for the plaintiffs countered, however, that unlike Apple's “fundamentally different” use of facial recognition to allow users to use their faces to unlock their iPhones, the company violated BIPA because it failed to obtain consent before using facial recognition in its Photos app. Apple told a federal judge in Illinois Thursday that it didn't violate the state’s biometric privacy law in using facial recognition technology through its Photos iPhone app, arguing that because the data was protected by end-to-end encryption, Apple never controlled it....
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