language: en · status: in-force · last checked: 2026-09-19

Washington — RCW 19.375 (biometric identifiers)

A risk-weighted extraction (26 subscribers, but broad definitions): Washington's biometric statute regulates enrolling biometric identifiers in a database for a commercial purpose — notice, consent or a prevention mechanism required, with sale/disclosure and retention limits.

Applicability to EdTech

• "Biometric identifier" expressly includes eye retinas and irises (RCW 19.375.010(1)) but excludes photographs/video and data generated therefrom — important for camera-based features; and "enroll" requires matching to a specific individual.
• The operative rule (RCW 19.375.020) hinges on "commercial purpose" (marketing-related sale/disclosure) — narrower than Illinois BIPA, and enforced by the AG under the Consumer Protection Act (no private right of action).
• The My Health My Data Act (RCW 19.373) is now in the corpus in full, and it is the wider of the two: no threshold, biometric data named as consumer health data, data inferred from non-health information caught as well, and enforcement through the Consumer Protection Act — so a private right of action. Where both could apply, read RCW 19.373 first; RCW 19.375 is the narrower, AG-only regime over enrolment in a database for a commercial purpose.

Contents

Licence

The reproduced text is RCW 19.375, enacted by the Washington State Legislature and served by the Legislature on app.leg.wa.gov. No copyright subsists in this text. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020), the Supreme Court held: "Under what has been dubbed the government edicts doctrine, officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties." It went on: "judges—and, we now confirm, legislators—may not be considered the 'authors' of the works they produce in the course of their official duties as judges and legislators. That rule applies regardless of whether a given material carries the force of law." (slip opinion, pp. 1 and 5–6, read 2026-10-01.)

The site footer reads "Copyright 2025. All Rights Reserved." (read 2026-10-01). That is a site-wide notice; under the holding above it cannot reach the statute text, which is the work of the Legislature in the course of its official duties. It may cover the site's own design, which the corpus does not reproduce.

Public-domain text carries no conditions. The corpus attributes it all the same: the {.meta} provenance line on each section names the publisher, the Sources section links the official text, and the Meta section describes what the builder changed (markup and anchors only). Nothing here suggests that the Washington State Legislature endorses the corpus.

Related

• FL §1002.222 — the school-side biometric ban
• IL BIPA (740 ILCS 14) — the private-right-of-action sibling
• WA My Health My Data (RCW 19.373) — the same state's wider regime, which reaches this one's excluded photographs and video through inference

Sources

• app.leg.wa.gov — RCW 19.375