Apple and eight other leading tech companies, including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Samsung, are battling proposed class-action lawsuits in Chicago federal court. Plaintiffs — journalists, podcasters, and audiobook narrators — allege the firms violated Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by using thousands of hours of recorded human voices without permission to train their AI systems.
Ross Kimbarovsky of Loevy & Loevy is representing the plaintiffs – a group of journalists, podcasters and audiobook narrators – in the proposed class action lawsuits. He said each of the defendants faces hundreds of millions of dollars in potential damages…
He said his Chicago firm, which specializes in civil rights law, will be paid on a contingency basis if the cases are successful. Kimbarovsky declined to detail the size of the firm’s potential stake.
BIPA contains statutory penalties for companies that collect biometric data from workers and consumers without informing them, obtaining consent or detailing the scope and duration of the collection. The law also requires companies to develop a written policy that includes guidelines for destroying such data and prohibits them from selling it.
The lawsuits do not allege copyright violations, unlike a wave of other cases nationwide alleging the unauthorized use of data to train AI models. The nine cases are currently spread among seven different judges at the Chicago court, although Apple last month asked for them to be consolidated before a single judge.
The tech companies deny the allegations and have assembled a phalanx of corporate defense attorneys at 10 law firms to battle the lawsuits, including Gibson Dunn for Apple…
MacDailyNews Take: If the companies are found to have violated BIPA by using content without permission to train their AI, then they should pay any damages that are awarded.
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