Chicago Business Litigation Lawyer Blog
Amazon is facing a class-action lawsuit filed in the Madison County Circuit Court alleging that Amazon’s Alexa violates the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). In setting out its case against Amazon, the Complaint quotes an interview with former Amazon senior editor James Marcus in which he said that “It was made clear from the beginning that data collection was also one of Amazon’s businesses. All customer behavior that flowed through the site was recorded and tracked. And that itself was a valuable commodity.”
The Complaint details the near ubiquity of Amazon’s voice-based virtual assistant Alexa by alleging that Alexa is embedded in numerous Amazon devices such as Echo speakers, Fire tablets, and others. The Complaint goes on to allege that Alexa can additionally be integrated into other devices such as phones, TVs, thermostats, appliances, lights, and many more consumer products.
The Complaint alleges that after Alexa responds to a request, Amazon collects and subsequently stores “voiceprints” of the user, and “transcriptions” of the voiceprints. These voiceprints and transcriptions constitute biometric identifiers or biometric information regulated by BIPA, according to the Complaint. The suit goes on to allege that Amazon does not delete the voiceprint or transcription after Alexa has responded. Instead, the Complaint alleges, Amazon uses these recordings to collect biometric information which it uses to improve the speech and voice recognition capabilities of Alexa.
Although Alexa is supposed to activate only after hearing its “wake word,” the Complaint alleges that Alexa-enabled devices frequently capture conversations by accident without being triggered. The Complaint cites a study conducted by Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the Bochum Max Planck Institute for Cyber Security and Privacy that allegedly discovered more than 1,000 sequences of words that incorrectly trigger smart speakers, such as Alexa. According to the Complaint, the study found that Alexa was inadvertently activated by the words “unacceptable” and “election.” Continue reading ›