Google has been hit with a privacy lawsuit over the Google
Cloud Contact Center AI -- an artificial intelligence service used by other companies' call centers.
In a complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California,
Misael Ambriz alleges that Google, through the Cloud Contact Center AI, wrongly “eavesdropped” on his conversation with a Verizon employee.
“A Google session manager
monitored the conversation between Plaintiff and Verizon, and Google ... transcribed plaintiff’s conversation in real time, analyzed the context of plaintiff’s conversation with Verizon,
and suggested 'smart replies' and news articles to the Verizon agent plaintiff was communicating with,” the complaint alleges.
Google said that Verizon was piloting the service in order “to deliver
more intuitive customer support through natural-language recognition, faster processing, and real-time customer service agent assistance.”
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The company also said at the time that the
Contact Center AI Agent Assist feature “offers Verizon’s customer care agents a real-time digital assistant that fetches relevant articles within the knowledge base, and then recommends
personalized responses to agents at each turn of the conversation.”
Ambriz claims the service violates California's wiretap law, which prohibits the interception of electronic
communications without all parties' consent.
“Neither Verizon nor Google procured plaintiff’s prior consent, express or otherwise, to have defendant eavesdrop on plaintiff’s
conversation with Verizon,” the complaint alleges.
His complaint alleges that he called Verizon's contact center several times, and expected the conversations to be between himself and
the telecom.
“During these calls with Verizon, plaintiff first interacted with a 'virtual agent.' Plaintiff was not aware, nor did he have any reason to suspect, that the virtual agent
was being provided by a third party, Google, rather than Verizon,” he alleges.
He added that even after being transferred to a human agent, Google continued to monitor the conversation
and suggest replies.
Google hasn't yet responded to MediaPost's request for comment.