{"id":246027,"date":"2026-05-14T13:48:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T17:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/14\/journalists-audiobook-narrators-sue-ai-giants-under-illinois-biometric-privacy-law-for-stealing-their-voices\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T14:50:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T18:50:09","slug":"journalists-audiobook-narrators-sue-ai-giants-under-illinois-biometric-privacy-law-for-stealing-their-voices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/14\/journalists-audiobook-narrators-sue-ai-giants-under-illinois-biometric-privacy-law-for-stealing-their-voices\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalists, Audiobook Narrators Sue AI Giants Under Illinois Biometric Privacy Law for &#8216;Stealing Their Voices&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news\/illinois-biometric-information-privacy-act\">Journalists, Audiobook Narrators Sue AI Giants Under Illinois Biometric Privacy Law for &#8216;Stealing Their Voices&#8217;<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news\/illinois-biometric-information-privacy-act\">https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news\/illinois-biometric-information-privacy-act<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-05-14 13:48:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.commondreams.org\">www.commondreams.org<\/a><\/p>\n<p>In yet another display of how Illinois&#8217; pioneering biometric privacy law can be used to protect Americans, state residents who work as audio storytellers, broadcast journalists, podcasters, voice actors, and more filed class-action lawsuits against Big Tech this week for &#8220;stealing their voices&#8221; to develop artificial intelligence products.<\/p>\n<p>Since Illinois legislators passed the groundbreaking Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) in 2008\u2014regulating the collection, use, safeguarding, handling, storage, retention, and destruction of biometric identifiers, including fingerprints, voiceprints, and scans of a retina, iris, hand, or face geometry\u2014there have been thousands of lawsuits filed and major settlements with Clearview AI, Facebook, and Six Flags.<\/p>\n<p>Represented by the award-winning civil rights firm Loevy + Loevy, the Illinoisans are suing Adobe, Alphabet and its subsidiary Google, Apple, Amazon, ElevenLabs, Facebook parent company Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Samsung under BIPA.<\/p>\n<p>The plaintiffs are audiobook narrators Lindsay Dorcus and Victoria Nassif as well as journalists Robin Amer, Yohance Lacour, Carol Marin, and Phil Rogers. Journalist Alison Flowers is part of all lawsuits except those against Amazon and Apple. Their lawyers noted that &#8220;between them, they have multiple Emmy and Peabody awards, several Pulitzer Prizes, several Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University awards, an Edward R. Murrow award, a James Beard award, a SOVAS award, and many, many other honors.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Their cases focus on the voiceprint of each plaintiff, which is &#8220;a digital fingerprint of the human voice,&#8221; as the complaints explain. &#8220;It is a mathematical capture of the acoustic features\u2014pitch, timbre, resonance\u2014that emerge from a person&#8217;s distinctive physiology, combined with the speech patterns that person develops over a lifetime: accent, cadence, articulation. Like a fingerprint, a voiceprint identifies the individual. Like a fingerprint, it cannot be changed.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The Adobe case targets&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news\/illinois-biometric-information-privacy-act\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Journalists, Audiobook Narrators Sue AI Giants Under Illinois Biometric Privacy Law for &#8216;Stealing Their Voices&#8217;&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":246028,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/media-library\/image.jpg?id=66734999&width=1200&height=600&coordinates=0%2C265%2C0%2C265","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246027"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246027"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246029,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246027\/revisions\/246029"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}