Shipping company Martin-Brower has been accused in a class action lawsuit of improperly recording workers' voices using its voice-activated warehouse technology, allegedly violating Illinois' biometrics privacy law.
The complaint alleges that the company uses a technology called "Vocollect" to create voiceprints or templates of its workers' speech patterns without their consent, which is then used to identify them within the warehouse system. This practice is alleged to be in violation of the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).
The lawsuit is similar to thousands of class actions that that have been filed against employers throughout Illinois since 2015.
The lawsuits all generally seek damages of $1,000-$5,000 per violation.
The Illinois Supreme Court has defined "individual violations" as each time a worker scans their fingerprint over a span of five years before filing suit. When multiplied across entire workforces punching a timeclock multiple times per day, such potential damage awards could be "annihilative," some judges have observed.
Since they first began to appear in Illinois courts about nine years ago, those lawsuits have resulted in a litany of multi-million dollar settlements, and hundreds of millions of dollars in collective attorney fees paid to class action lawyers who file the suits.