An Illinois law is a leading example for law makers on Capitol Hill as negotiations over federal privacy rules continue to be debated. The law known as the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) pertains to companies collecting the biometric identifiers of Illinois residents, such as their fingerprints, faceprints, or iris scans, and requires such companies to alert applicable residents and obtain their consent in writing. The law was passed in 2008 and has a powerful clause allowing private citizens to sue companies for privacy violations. A proposed private right of action provision in the federal American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA), would allow the same rights for private citizens to sue companies for privacy violations but in regard to federal privacy laws. This was an impeding obstacle in advancing the bill to the House or Senate floor last year despite having overwhelming bipartisan backing. On one side, privacy activists don’t want to support a bill that doesn’t include a powerful private right of action. They have suggested that state and federal agencies lack the bandwidth to bring on their own lawsuits, or sometimes it may be the case that some agencies have been “captured” by the industry, leaving citizens without a means of meaningfully enforcing privacy violations. However, big tech and other companies strongly opposed the private right of action element of the bill because of the high likelihood for such a provision to be abused by plaintiff attorneys. Such cases have been seen where individual plaintiffs have been able to successfully win big settlements under Illinois’ BIPA law. While privacy activists see it as necessary to protect basic privacy rights and businesses see it as a provision that encourages abusive litigation, law makers are seeking a way to scale back the private right of action element of ADPPA and making it more business-friendly. ADPPA’s time will come, where Congress will look for a way to balance the complex tradeoff between individuals’ basic rights to privacy and the ability for businesses to function without expensive and potentially abusive lawsuits.