Walmart targeted with lawsuit over customer service line voice recordings

By Jonathan Bilyk | Legal Newsline
The Center Square

(Legal Newsline) — Walmart has been tagged yet again in a class action lawsuit brought under Illinois’ biometrics privacy law, this time for allegedly recording customers’ voices without their consent when they call into a Walmart customer service line.

The new lawsuit was filed July 13 in southern Illinois federal district court by attorneys with the firms of Gordon Gordon & Centracchio, of Chicago; The Grant Law Firm, of New York; and Kantrowitz Goldhamer Graifman Pearlmutter & Caballo, of Chestnut Ridge, New York.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of named plaintiff Jeanne Thomas, identified in the complaint only as an Illinois resident “who has made telephone calls to Walmart’s customer line” for its store in Vandalia.

However, the lawsuit seeks to expand the complaint to include at least hundreds of other people who could be included in a class of additional Illinois resident plaintiffs who have similarly called into Walmart’s customer service line.

The lawsuit centers on claims that Walmart allegedly improperly records the callers’ voices. Specifically, the lawsuit accuses Walmart of using technology, including artificial intelligence programs, to allegedly create a “voice print,” unique to each customer, by allegedly isolating a caller’s “vocal characteristics” and then measuring “the physical and behavioral identifiers of a person’s voice,” which can include “pitch, cadence, tone and frequency spectrums.”

According to the complaint, Walmart allegedly does this “presumably to prevent fraud” by matching a caller to their recorded and logged “voiceprint” template, as well as to “perform ’emotional tracking'” on a caller, “to gauge customer frustration or urgency.”

While customers who call into the customer service line are reportedly told that the call is being recorded “for business purposes, including fraud prevention,” the lawsuit asserts the notification falls short of providing more specific notifications allegedly required under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).

Further, the lawsuit asserts Walmart’s “privacy policy” concerning customer phone interactions falls short of providing the information required under the BIPA law, such as the purposes for which “voiceprints” are being created; how that biometric information will be stored; how it will be shared; and when it may ultimately be destroyed.

And the lawsuit asserts Walmart allegedly failed to secure written consent from customers before allegedly recording and digitally mapping their voices.

The new lawsuit marks at least the sixth time Walmart has been sued in Illinois under the BIPA law, a statute that has proven in the past decade to be a lucrative source of paydays for trial lawyers and others bringing lawsuits in Illinois courts and elsewhere in the country.

Thousands of class action lawsuits have been filed under the BIPA law in state and federal courts in Illinois and other jurisdictions since 2015.

Those lawsuits all generally accuse companies of alleged unauthorized scans of people’s so-called unique “biometric identifiers,” including fingerprints, “voice prints” and facial geometry, among others.

The overwhelming bulk of BIPA litigation has landed on employers in Illinois, who have been routinely accused of wrongly scanning workers’ fingerprints, faces, voices and other biometric characteristics, without first obtaining written consent or providing notices about how that information might be stored, used, shared and destroyed, among other technical provisions in the law.

The BIPA law, however, has gained notoriety, thanks to headline-grabbing settlements worth hundreds of millions of dollars apiece in lawsuits targeting tech giants, including Apple, Meta and Google, among others.

The law, to this point, however, has largely allowed trial lawyers to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in fees paid by businesses targeted by the lawsuits, without ever having to prove any of their clients were actually harmed.

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, has also been a repeat target under the BIPA law.

Other lawsuits have claimed Walmart has violated the Illinois law by allegedly improperly scanning workers’ fingerprints when they punched the clock; improperly scanned customers’ faces at self-checkout lanes; improperly scanned customers’ faces using store surveillance cameras; and improperly scanned warehouse workers’ voiceprints when they spoke over their workplace headset radios.

Walmart also paid $10 million in 2021 to settle a class action accusing the company of allegedly improperly scanning workers’ hands when accessing cash register drawers.

As the other lawsuits, the new class action over customer “voiceprints” also seeks a large payout, potentially worth millions of dollars, as it asks the court to order Walmart to pay damages allowed under the law of $1,000 or $5,000 per violation.

When multiplied across potential class members, as asserted in the complaint, the damages could quickly mount.

Walmart has not yet responded to the complaint in court.