• by Wendy Davis , Yesterday

Siding against Meta Platforms, a federal judge this week rejected the company's request to throw out a lawsuit accusing it of violating Illinois biometric privacy law by allegedly collecting "voiceprints" from Messenger users.

In a decision issued under seal last month and made public Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston in the Northern District of California essentially said the dispute involved factual questions -- including questions about Meta's technology and whether the company actually did gather "voiceprints" -- that cannot be resolved without additional court proceedings.

"Plaintiff has forwarded sufficient evidence to create a genuine issue of material fact as to whether ... Meta has collected plaintiff’s voiceprint," Illston wrote in an order denying Meta's motion for summary judgment -- meaning a ruling in its favor before trial.

The decision came in a lawsuit brought in 2023 by Illinois resident Natalie Delgado, who alleged in a class-action complaint that Meta violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act by collecting voiceprints without written consent.

That law prohibits companies from collecting voiceprints, retinal scans, fingerprints, scans of facial geometry, and other biometric identifiers from state residents without their permission. The statute does not define voiceprints.

Delgado alleged that Meta updated its privacy policy in January 2023 to disclose that it “may” have collected users' voice recordings at some time in the previous 12 months. That updated provision also said those voice recordings “may be used to identify you,” according to the complaint.

Her complaint also referenced a patent awarded to Meta in 2020 for a method of identifying social networking users based on their voices.

Meta sought summary judgment, arguing in papers filed earlier this year that there was no evidence that it "processed" voice recordings in a way that would create "anything remotely resembling a voiceprint."

The company elaborated that it stores Facebook and Messenger audio files in a way that allows it to connect the files to a user's account, but doesn't identify who is speaking in those files.

"There is no feature to 'tag' a voice within a video or audio file with the speaker’s identity -- as with tagging faces in photos," the company argued. "Further, users are not limited to sharing files containing only their own voices; to the contrary, users can -- and do -- upload files containing another person’s voice, multiple voices, or no human voices at all."

Illston rejected that argument for now, writing that there are "disputed facts regarding whether Meta has collected plaintiff’s voice recordings in a manner that is capable of identifying plaintiff due to the in-house technical capabilities Meta itself has developed and possesses."

She added: "Plaintiff has come forward with admissible evidence that Meta has its own proprietary technologies and a wealth of internal systems in place to process a voice recording and link it to a user account and to all of the personally identifiable data (e.g., name, date of birth, address, IP address, etc.) that Meta associated with that account."

Last week, Meta asked Illston to authorize an immediate appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that whether the voice recordings it collected are "voiceprints" for purposes of the Illinois privacy law is a legal question that should be decided by an appellate court.