Nine class action lawsuits filed in Illinois under the nation’s strongest biometric data privacy law.
Chicago, Illinois (Capitol News Illinois) – This week, a group of prominent Chicago-based journalists, podcasters, and voice actors accused tech giants including Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft of “stealing” their audio to train artificial intelligence in hundreds of pages of legal filings.
Nine class-action lawsuits filed Monday through Wednesday in federal court in Chicago mark new ground for Illinois, which has the nation’s strongest biometric data privacy law. Over the past decade or so, the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) has led to thousands of lawsuits against companies for collecting and storing biometric data from employees and customers without proper notice or consent.
The bulk of that litigation, which has resulted in millions of dollars being awarded to Illinoisans primarily through class-action settlements, revolved around employee fingerprints collected by time-clock technology. However, Facebook’s $650 million settlement in 2020 was with users over facial recognition.
read more: Court ruling strengthens Illinois’ strongest biometric privacy law in the country
However, technology rapidly evolved as companies adopted policies to become BIPA compliant and the pool of plaintiffs began to dry up. Smart security cameras, workplace-focused safety cameras, and online “try-on” technology that allows users to imagine what a particular pair of glasses would look like on their face, for example, are popular targets for BIPA litigation.
And with the breakneck speed of AI development, companies are focused on building out that technology, which could be the next major focus for BIPA lawyers.
In a lawsuit filed this week, well-known local broadcast journalists such as Carol Mullin and Phil Rogers, who retired from Chicago news station NBC 5, as well as podcast hosts and voice actors, allege that the company captured their audio recordings to train its AI’s “foundational speech model.”
“What we are witnessing is an illegal and unethical exploitation of human resources on a massive scale, and one of the largest biometric privacy violations ever committed,” Ross Kimbarofsky, an attorney with the Chicago-based law firm Loevy & Loevy, said Thursday. statement announcing the lawsuit.
Kimberowski accused companies of ignoring BIPA despite knowing “exactly how to build a BIPA-compliant consent system.”
“They’ve built a billion-dollar industry out of stolen audio because they thought no one would pay for it,” he says.
Other plaintiffs include journalist Robin Ammar, audiobook narrators and voice actors Lindsay Dorcas and Victoria Nassif, and podcasters Johans LaCour and Alison Flowers, all of Illinois.
High-tech giant nominated
The lawsuit names Amazon, Adobe, Google and its parent company Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung, as well as Facebook’s parent company Meta, text-to-speech AI company Eleven Labs, and advanced computer chip maker Nvidia. None of the companies responded to requests for comment on the lawsuit.
Defenders of BIPA point out that biometric information is unique and losing control of it can be irrevocable. For example, if a person’s Social Security number is stolen, obtaining a new number may be difficult, but not impossible. But they argue there is no remedy for stolen fingerprints, retinal, voice or facial scans. The law requires companies implementing this technology to obtain written consent before collecting biometric information.
But the lawsuit alleges that the companies didn’t give anyone an opportunity to consent to having their voiceprints included in the AI training models.
“None of them were informed that their voices were being used to train Amazon’s commercial voice AI,” the lawsuit against Amazon said. “No one was asked. No one agreed.”
According to the complaint, a voiceprint is a “digital fingerprint of a human voice,” and a voiceprint is characterized as a “mathematical representation” of someone’s voice, including pitch, timbre, and resonance as determined by the speaker’s physiology. The voice is also defined by speech patterns that are “cultivated over a lifetime,” such as accent, rhythm, and articulation.
“Voiceprints, like fingerprints, identify individuals and cannot be changed,” the complaint states. “Social Security numbers can be reissued. … A person who has had their voiceprint taken cannot recover it by changing their voice. The biological and behavioral patterns that produced the voiceprint are the same that are used when speaking every day.”
A lawsuit focused on voiceprints could very well be fertile ground for BIPA, especially if the judge who considered the complaint filed this week agrees to let the case move forward. Industry experts believe the case may hinge on whether voiceprints can be identified.
In early 2023, luxury grocer Whole Foods (acquired by Amazon in 2017) solved the case The documents were brought in by 330 warehouse employees, and the company claims the voiceprints were collected without permission and used to identify the employees. The $300,000 payment marks the first BIPA settlement of a lawsuit focused on voice prints.
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