Meet the lawyer who stood between Big Tech and your facial recognition data

This story is part of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business 2022. Explore the full list of innovators who broke through this year—and had an impact on the world around us.

May 9, 2022, was a helluva day for digital privacy champions, thanks in large part to attorney Jay Edelson. That was the day that Facebook began paying out a record $650 million settlement stemming from a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that Edelson’s Chicago-based firm had filed in 2015, which accused the social-media giant of violating Illinois’s biometric privacy law by collecting and storing facial recognition data. (His win led Facebook to halt its program last November.) May 9 was also the day that Edelson won his suit against Clearview AI, brought pro bono on behalf of the ACLU, which charged that the controversial company was illegally scraping images and converting them into vector-based “faceprints.” Clearview AI, valued at $130 million, agreed to cease allowing private U.S. organizations, such as retail security firms, access to its faceprint database. Edelson, who founded his eponymous firm in 2007 and oversees a team of 50, seeks out potential legal opportunities rather than wait for aggrieved parties to find him. In a lab within the firm, attorneys and technologists scrutinize—and even break apart—new apps and devices to figure out how they work and identify a potential case they want to pitch. “It’s almost like a scene from the Tom Hanks movie Big, where he’s playing with different toys,” Edelson says. This digital forensics team has the freedom to pursue what it believes in even if Edelson disagrees, then helps draft the complaints, embedding screenshots and, sometimes, even providing iPads later for judges to use so the tech has the same visceral impact on them as it does on consumers. “If you’re trying to convince a court to do something new—really, create a new area of law, which is what we’re trying to accomplish,” says Edelson, “you have to convince them that it’s right to do so, and it matters.” In the last two-plus years, Edelson’s firm has won more than $3 billion in settlements and verdicts.

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