Apple Faces $32.5B Lawsuit Over iPhone Photos App Facial Recognition

Apple is being sued for $32.5 billion over the way its iPhone Photos app handles faces in your library. The lawsuit, filed as a class action in Illinois, alleges that the company has been collecting biometric data—specifically, facial recognition information—without asking permission or telling users it was happening.

The Photos app includes a feature called "People" that uses facial recognition to identify and organize photos by who appears in them. According to the lawsuit, when you take pictures and store them on your iPhone, the app scans those images and creates what the legal filing calls a "faceprint" for each face it detects. Once the software has analyzed enough photos of the same person, it uses an algorithm to identify that individual across your entire photo library. This biometric information is then stored on your device and used to organize your photos. The plaintiffs argue that Apple performed this analysis and data collection without consent, in direct violation of Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act, a law passed in 2008 that specifically regulates how companies can collect and use biometric identifiers like fingerprints, iris scans, voiceprints, and faceprints.

The case has been moving through the courts since March 2020, when roughly ten Apple users filed the initial complaint. In June 2026, an Illinois judge determined that the plaintiffs had met the legal threshold to proceed as a class action lawsuit, meaning the case could represent a much larger group of affected users. On Thursday of that week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected Apple's attempt to overturn that decision, clearing the path for the lawsuit to move forward.

The scale of potential liability is enormous. As many as 6.5 million Illinois residents could be eligible to claim damages if the case succeeds. The law allows for up to $5,000 per person in damages, which is how the $32.5 billion figure was calculated. The plaintiffs' core argument is straightforward: Apple collected biometric information through the Photos app's facial recognition capability without providing notice, obtaining consent, or following the data retention policies required by law.

Apple has long marketed itself as a privacy-focused company, particularly through its Face ID feature, which uses facial recognition as a security mechanism to unlock iPhones and authenticate payments. The company has emphasized that this biometric data is processed on the device itself and never sent to Apple's servers. The lawsuit does not challenge Face ID directly, but rather focuses on the separate facial recognition happening silently in the Photos app—a feature that many users may not even realize is active. The distinction matters: Face ID is something users knowingly enable and interact with. The Photos app's facial recognition, by contrast, operates in the background as part of the app's organizational features, and the lawsuit contends that Apple never obtained explicit permission to create and store faceprints for identification purposes.

The rejection of Apple's appeal by the federal court is a significant moment in the case. It means the company's legal arguments for dismissing the lawsuit did not persuade the appellate judges, and the class action can now proceed toward discovery and potentially trial. For Apple, the stakes are not just financial—a loss here could reshape how the company handles biometric data collection across its ecosystem and might prompt similar lawsuits in other states with comparable privacy laws. For the millions of Illinois residents who have used the Photos app, the case represents a test of whether companies can collect biometric information as a default feature without explicit user consent, even when that data never leaves the device.