Tech giants sued under BIPA over voiceprints used to train AI

Google is facing a new lawsuit under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), accusing the company of training voice AI models on biometric voiceprints from journalists, investigative podcasters and audiobook narrators.

The lawsuit was brought by seven plaintiffs who claim that Google created its foundational models based on thousands of hours of recorded speech to extract biometric voiceprints. The models were used to power products such as Gemini Live, NotebookLM Audio Overviews, YouTube auto-dubbing, Google Cloud Text-to-Speech and Google Assistant.

Among the plaintiffs are award-winning broadcast journalists Carol Marin and Philip Rogers, investigative podcasters Yohance Lacour, Alison Flowers and Robin Amer, and audiobook narrators Lindsey Dorcus and Victoria Nassif.

Separate but related class-action lawsuits brought by the same group of plaintiffs also target Amazon, Apple Inc., Meta Platforms, Microsoft, NVIDIA, ElevenLabs, Adobe and Samsung Electronics.

According to the complaints, the companies built commercial AI voice systems using voiceprints collected from the internet and other sources without obtaining written consent, providing notice or publishing biometric data retention policies required under BIPA.

In Google’s case, the plaintiffs claim the technology built on these biometric voiceprints is being used to compete with some of the plaintiffs’ professions. Google Text-to-Speech, for instance, is now used by audiobook publishers as an alternative to human narration, while NotebookLM Audio Overviews can be used to generate podcasts, directly competing with investigative audio journalism and narration work.

BIPA recognizes biometric identifiers as “biologically unique to the individual,” meaning that once they are exposed or misused, an individual cannot easily replace or revoke them, says the Google lawsuit.

“The voiceprints Google extracted from Plaintiffs are not stored in a database that can be deleted on request,” it says. “They are encoded in the parameters of Google’s commercial voice models and reproduced in the audio that those models generate. At this point, the biometric data and the product are the same thing.”

The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages and injunctive relief requiring Google to cease collecting biometric identifiers from voice recordings produced or recorded in Illinois without consent. The suit also asks the tech company to destroy all voiceprints and biometric information unlawfully obtained from the plaintiffs.

Google is facing a separate suit in California brought by former NPR host David Greene, who claims that his voice was also used to train AI without authorization.

The lawsuit argues that Google’s conduct was intentional rather than the result of misunderstanding or technical inability to comply with BIPA requirements. Google has previously faced multiple BIPA cases and paid millions of dollars to settle claims involving biometric data collection without consent.

Article Topics

biometric data  |  biometric identifiers  |  Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA)  |  Google  |  lawsuits  |  voice AI  |  voice biometrics  |  voiceprints