Apple is no stranger to class action lawsuits. The company had to pay customers $50 million over its infamous "butterfly keyboards," and $250 million over the AI features it promised to ship with certain iPhones but didn't. (Many of those features, by the way, are now coming out this year.) But in all my time covering Apple lawsuits, I'm not sure I've ever seen a potential payout this huge. As reported by The Times, Apple is facing a $32.5 billion class action lawsuit, though the actual suit might be even more notable than the sum.

Why is Apple being sued?

As The Times reports, the basis for the lawsuit surrounds Apple's collection of biometric data, specifically the data it collected from Illinois citizens. The suit claims Apple violated Illinois law by collecting these users' biometric data through facial recognition without properly notifying them. The state passed the "Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act" in 2008 to protect users from companies that collect data like retina or "iris scans, fingerprints, voiceprints or faceprints." The law says companies can collect this information, but only after getting written consent from each user.

The lawsuit claims Apple's Photos app automatically uses facial recognition to scan faces in a user's library and develop a "faceprint" for each person it finds. According to the suit, Apple's Photos app then uses an algorithm to single out the iPhone user. Once it does, it creates and stores biometric data on the device to categorize that user in the app. One hitch for Apple is that not all of this data is stored on the users' device, at least as the lawsuit sees it. As users can sync Photos data across devices, plaintiffs say that Apple stores their biometric data on its servers, which would violate the law.

The lawsuit is divided into three classes: "Local Device Class," which impacts Illinois citizens whose Apple devices put a picture of them into a People album any time between Sept. 13, 2016 and today; "iCloud Subclass," which impacts Illinois citizens who had a People album tagged with their name or another identifier, and had an iCloud account enabled for photo storage, at any time between Sept. 13, 2016 and today; and "iCloud Faceprint Subclass," which impacts Illinois citizens who had a device running iOS 17.6, iPadOS 17.6, or macOS Sonoma 14.6 or later, with a device that put their photo into a People album, and who had 5,000 or more photos and videos in their iCloud Photo library, any time between March 25, 2025 and today.

Apple, on the other hand, has been seeking to throw out the case. The company argues that the privacy safeguards it develops for Photos are in compliance with the Illinois law, including the fact that the raw biometric data cannot be used to recreate a face or be linked to someone's identity, and that Apple itself cannot access your Photos data. Crucially, Apple claims that all facial recognition processes happen on each device individually. What syncs across devices are labels: If you choose to identify a friend or family member in the Photos app on your iPhone, that gets synced with, say, your Mac, but your Mac then has to go through the task of identifying photos with that person in them—it won't simply carry over that data from your iPhone.

This case is not new. According to 9to5Mac, it was first filed back in March of 2020. Though it has changed much in the six years since, this week marked a significant milestone, as an Illinois judge ruled the plaintiffs had met the requirements for a class action lawsuit.

Meta faced a similar lawsuit

Apple is not the first company to face such a class action lawsuit in violation of the 2008 Illinois law. Meta, or Facebook as it was known at the time, had to pay in a similar case back in 2021. That lawsuit also started years earlier, back in 2015, and claimed that the company did not get user consent before using facial tagging features. Unlike Apple, there was no ambiguity as to whether or not Meta stored user data on its servers.

Under the law, users were entitled to $345, and three were given $5,000 each. In total, Meta had to spend $650 million to settle the suit, accounting for roughly 6.9 million Facebook users in Illinois. By comparison, the Apple lawsuit impacts approximately 6.5 million users.

How much will Apple have to pay individual users?

While Meta had to pay most users $345, Apple could be facing much steeper payouts in this case. Each victim may be entitled to up to $5,000. Assuming each of the 6.5 million is paid that amount, Apple will have shelled out $32.5 billion. It marks about 0.7% of the company's $4.5 trillion market valuation, which might not sound like much percentage-wise, but it's far greater than the typical "speeding ticket" companies like Apple are used to paying.

It's too early to know whether you'll be entitled to a cut of this suit. Apple could still have it tossed, after all. But it's a remarkable development in class-action lawsuits against big tech companies, particularly after what we saw from Meta's lawsuit five years ago.