Illinois residents who used Samsung Galaxy phones and tablets were the proposed class in a biometric privacy suit over face scanning built into the preinstalled Gallery app. The case was dismissed with prejudice and the Seventh Circuit affirmed on August 7, 2026; there is no settlement and nothing to claim.
Allegations Only · Never Proven
The claims described below are allegations that were never tested at trial. Samsung denied them, the district court dismissed the complaint for failure to state a claim, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed. Samsung has not been found liable, no class was certified, and there is nothing to claim. This page is informational and is not legal advice.
Current Status
The case is over. On August 7, 2026, a Seventh Circuit panel affirmed the dismissal of the Illinois biometric privacy class action against Samsung, holding that the complaint did not plausibly allege Samsung ever controlled the face-geometry data its software created on users' own devices. The district court had already dismissed the second amended complaint with prejudice and entered judgment for Samsung. Final judgment issued on the appellate docket the same day as the opinion, with costs, and no petition for rehearing appears on that docket.There is no settlement, no fund, no administrator, no claim form and no deadline. The proposed class of Illinois residents was never certified, and Samsung paid nothing.
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What the Case Alleged
The suit, filed in the Northern District of Illinois on September 20, 2021, targeted the photo gallery application preinstalled on Samsung phones and tablets. According to the complaint, once a picture is saved to the device the Gallery app automatically scans it for faces and, when it finds one, builds a "face template" from the geometry of that face — the length, width, depth, spacing and position of landmarks such as the eyes, nose, mouth, chin and ears. The app then matches templates against other photos on the device and stacks the matching images together.Plaintiffs argued that this made Samsung a private entity in possession of biometric identifiers under sections 15(a) and 15(b) of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which require a written retention-and-destruction policy and informed written consent before collection. They pointed out that users license the software rather than own it, cannot modify it, and cannot switch the facial recognition off if they want to use the camera and gallery at all — and that Samsung's own privacy policy says it "may collect" biometric information.
Why It Failed — the Control Requirement
Both courts stopped at a threshold question: who actually holds the data. Reading Illinois decisions interpreting BIPA, the Seventh Circuit concluded that the statute's operative verbs — "possession," "collect," "capture" and "obtain" — all require the company to have or to have obtained some degree of control over the biometric data in question. Providing the hardware and the software that let a user generate face templates is not the same as controlling what those tools produce.On that reading the complaint came up short. The panel accepted the description of what the Gallery app does, but found nothing in the pleading from which it could reasonably infer that Samsung itself controlled templates that were created and stored in the memory of the user's own phone. The judgment was affirmed.
What the Ruling Does and Does Not Decide
The holding is about control, not about phones. Biometric data a company uploads, receives or keeps on its own servers is a different case, and the opinion does not touch it — the plaintiffs' own allegations noted that Samsung Cloud photo backup existed before September 2021, a route the pleading did not carry over the line. Nor does the ruling bless any particular consent practice: it never reached whether Samsung's disclosures would have satisfied BIPA, because it never had to.What it does settle, for federal courts in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, is that a manufacturer does not "possess" biometric data simply by shipping software capable of generating it. That reasoning reaches the on-device face and iris features this page originally described, including the "Intelligent Scan" unlock on the Galaxy S9 and Note9, which processes and stores its data on the handset in the same way. An earlier version of this page treated those features as an open investigation with compensation likely to follow; that framing was wrong and has been replaced.
The Separate Mass Arbitration
A second track ran alongside the class action and also failed. Several thousand Illinois consumers filed individual BIPA arbitration demands against Samsung with the American Arbitration Association. Samsung disputed that it had an arbitration agreement with them and refused to pay the AAA's administrative filing fees, and the AAA terminated the proceedings under its own rules. The claimants went to federal court to compel arbitration and force Samsung to pay the fees; the district court ordered both.The Seventh Circuit reversed on July 1, 2024 in Wallrich v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc., holding that the claimants had not met their evidentiary burden of proving an arbitration agreement existed and, in any event, could not compel Samsung to pay the AAA's fees once the association had closed the cases. The panel noted the consumers were not left without recourse and could pursue their claims on the merits in district court.
Case Timeline
- September 20, 2021: the class action is filed in the Northern District of Illinois.
- 2022 – 2024: Samsung moves to dismiss three times; the court grants the first two with leave to amend.
- 2024: the district court dismisses the second amended complaint with prejudice and enters judgment for Samsung.
- July 1, 2024: the Seventh Circuit reverses the order compelling Samsung to arbitrate and pay AAA fees in the parallel mass arbitration.
- January 24, 2025: the appeal is docketed in the Seventh Circuit.
- October 28, 2025: the appeal is argued and taken under advisement.
- August 7, 2026: the Seventh Circuit affirms; final judgment issues with costs.
What to Do Now
There is nothing to file on this case, and no page or firm can create a claim where a court has entered judgment for the defendant. Illinois biometric privacy litigation itself is very much alive — the theory that failed here was the on-device one, and cases about data that reaches a company's servers continue. OCA tracks the closest live example on its Apple Face ID BIPA lawsuit page, and the Neutrogena Skin360 BIPA settlement is an Illinois biometric case currently paying claims.Samsung also faces a separate privacy case over automatic content recognition in its smart TVs, which is unrelated to this one and still in litigation — see OCA's Samsung smart TV viewing-data lawsuit page.
Questions
Is there a Samsung Galaxy biometric privacy settlement to claim?
No. There is no settlement, no fund, no administrator and no claim form. The district court dismissed the case with prejudice and the Seventh Circuit affirmed that dismissal on August 7, 2026, so Samsung paid nothing and the proposed Illinois class was never certified.
Why did the Samsung BIPA case fail?
The Seventh Circuit held that BIPA's terms possession, collect, capture and obtain all require a company to have some degree of control over the biometric data. The complaint did not plausibly allege that Samsung controlled the face templates, because the Gallery app created and stored them on the user's own device.
Does the ruling mean BIPA no longer applies to phones?
Not in general. The ruling turns on control, not on the device. Biometric data a company uploads, receives or stores on its own servers can still fall under BIPA. What the Seventh Circuit rejected was the theory that selling a phone with software capable of generating face templates gives the manufacturer possession of data that never leaves the handset.
What happened to the separate Samsung arbitration claims?
Several thousand Illinois consumers filed individual BIPA arbitration demands with the American Arbitration Association. Samsung refused to pay the AAA's administrative filing fees and the AAA terminated the proceedings. The Seventh Circuit reversed an order compelling Samsung to arbitrate and to pay those fees on July 1, 2024, in Wallrich v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc.
Can Samsung Galaxy owners in Illinois still bring a biometric privacy claim?
Nothing on this page is legal advice, and whether any individual still has a viable claim depends on facts a lawyer would need to review. What the record shows is that the on-device theory was rejected at the pleading stage and affirmed on appeal, and that BIPA carries a five-year limitations period under the Illinois Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Tims v. Black Horse Carriers.
Sources
- Seventh Circuit opinion, G.T. v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc., No. 25-1120 (Aug. 7, 2026)
- Seventh Circuit docket, No. 25-1120
- Seventh Circuit opinion, Wallrich v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc., No. 23-2842 (July 1, 2024)
- Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, 740 ILCS 14
- Samsung on biometric authentication and Intelligent Scan
