State Sen. Bill Cunningham, D-Chicago, is pictured at a committee hearing in Chicago in July 2023. (Andrew Adams / Capitol News Illinois)
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Democratic leaders in the legislature appear ready to revive talks to reform the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA, after business groups poured cold water on the majority party’s ideas last spring.

This Feb. 24, 2021 photo shows a T-Mobile store at a shopping mall in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo / Keith Srakocic)
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The names, Social Security numbers and information from driver’s licenses or other identification of just over 40 million people who applied for T-Mobile credit were exposed in a recent data breach, the company said Wednesday.

(WTTW News)

According to a 41-page complaint filed Thursday, the Chicago Police Department has refused to share information about its social media monitoring task force, including the reason for its expansion, which accounts are tracked and what is done with that information.

(Cytonn Photography / Unsplash)

As data breaches in recent years have exposed weaknesses in the storage and transfer of personal data, lawmakers in the United States and Europe have expressed concern over the tracking of users online. 

Illinois’ law regulating the collection of biometrics – or physical measurements like fingerprints – is one of the strictest in the nation but could be amended through a current bill in the state Legislature. (WTTW News)

A New York Times tech columnist calls it the “best law you’ve never heard of.” She is speaking of Illinois’ biometrics privacy act, which essentially gives residents protections against companies that want to gather biometric info like face scans and fingerprints. But now, several bills in the Illinois General Assembly aim to strip away some of those protections.

This March 29, 2018 file photo shows the Facebook logo on screens at the Nasdaq MarketSite, in New York’s Times Square. (AP Photo / Richard Drew, File)

A federal judge on Friday approved a $650 million settlement of a privacy lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly using photo face-tagging and other biometric data without the permission of its users.

A visitor to an Apple store wears a T-shirt promoting TikTok in Beijing on Friday, July 17, 2020. (AP Photo / Ng Han Guan)
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President Donald Trump has ordered sweeping but vague ban on dealings with the Chinese owners of popular apps TikTok and WeChat, saying they are a threat to U.S. national security, foreign policy and the economy.

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Apple and Google launched a major joint effort to leverage smartphone technology to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The same Illinois privacy law that recently led Facebook to settle a class-action lawsuit for $550 million could trip up Google as well.

(WTTW News)

The Chicago Police Department recently started working with a controversial facial recognition tool. CPD says it’s not using it for real-time surveillance, but some advocacy groups still have concerns.

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A Chicago firm is suing the vendor behind the SAT and Advanced Placement exams in a federal class-action suit that accuses them of collecting and selling millions of students’ personal information.

This Sunday, Dec. 1, 2019, photo shows rewards offered through Chase bank on an iPhone in the Brooklyn borough of New York.  (AP Photo / Jenny Kane)

There’s a powerful new player watching what you buy so it can tailor product offerings for you: the bank behind your credit or debit card.

(AhmadArdity / Pixabay)

When you send messages to an Airbnb host or order food through Yelp, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about where else that information goes – or who it goes to. But that data has the potential to affect you in surprising ways.

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A group of Democratic Illinois lawmakers believes the group behind the SAT and Advanced Placement exams may be violating state law by selling student data to colleges, universities and scholarship providers.

(Ken Lund / Flickr)

Police departments and divorce attorneys are collecting personal data from I-Pass users. WBEZ reporter Tony Arnold tells us how that happens – and why it’s legal.

In this July 30, 2019, file photo, the social media application, Facebook is displayed on Apple’s App Store. (AP Photo / Amr Alfiky)

The company did not give a timeline for when it might expand it to the U.S. and other countries, only that it will be in “coming months.”