Lawsuit tracker
Illinois Voiceprint BIPA Cases
Illinois voiceprint BIPA class actions (nine coordinated suits against Adobe, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, ElevenLabs, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Samsung)
| Plaintiffs | Seven Illinois voice professionals — broadcast journalists Carol Marin and Phil Rogers, journalist-podcasters Robin Amer, Yohance Lacour and Alison Flowers, and audiobook narrators and voice actors Lindsay Dorcus and Victoria Nassif — on behalf of putative classes of people whose voice recordings were made in Illinois |
|---|---|
| Defendants | Adobe, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, ElevenLabs, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Samsung, one suit per company |
| Court | Illinois; the firm’s announcement does not name the venue, and docket-tracker reporting describes federal filings in the Northern District of Illinois |
| Filed | 2026-05 |
| Status | Active |
| Content type | voice |
| Last updated | 2026-07-21 |
The claims
Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act: collecting, storing, using and profiting from voiceprints without written notice, purpose and duration disclosure, a written release, or a public retention policy. BIPA provides statutory damages of $1,000 to $5,000 per violation.
What has happened
In mid-May 2026, seven Illinois voice professionals — including Emmy-, Peabody- and Pulitzer-recognized journalists, podcasters and audiobook narrators — filed nine coordinated class actions, one against each defendant. The complaints allege the companies extracted voiceprints, described as mathematical representations of pitch, timbre and resonance, from publicly available audio such as broadcasts, podcasts and audiobooks, then used them to train commercial voice and text-to-speech models without the written consent BIPA has required since 2008. The complaints cite the defendants’ compliance behavior elsewhere as evidence of knowledge, pointing to consent flows some defendants use for customer-uploaded voices and to prior nine- and ten-figure biometric settlements involving Meta and Google. Not every plaintiff appears in every suit; per the firm’s announcement, Alison Flowers is on all complaints except those against Amazon and Apple.
Key developments
- 2026-05 — Nine coordinated BIPA class actions filed in Illinois during the week of May 11, 2026, one per defendant.
- 2026-05-14 — Loevy + Loevy announces the suits, naming the nine corporate defendants and seven named plaintiffs.
- 2026-05-19 — Statewide and national coverage follows, including the Chicago Sun-Times, CBS Chicago and Capitol News Illinois.
Why it matters for training data
These cases attack the training pipeline under privacy law rather than copyright, which changes the defense landscape: fair use is no answer to BIPA, damages are statutory and per-violation, and “the audio was public” is not consent. Any voice-model builder with Illinois speakers in its corpus shares the exposure profile, and the defendant list — from chipmakers to app platforms — shows plaintiffs sweeping the supply chain, not just model hosts. Suppliers of scraped audio should expect biometric-consent warranties to enter dataset contracts, and buyers should ask whether any speaker-identification or voiceprint step touches Illinois residents.
Sources
- Loevy + Loevy announcement of the nine suits
- American Bar Association on the voiceprint BIPA trend
- Chicago Sun-Times coverage
- CBS Chicago coverage
- Capitol News Illinois coverage
Deeper analysis
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