Did Zoom's AI Collect Your Voiceprint Without Your Consent?
Silver Golub & Teitell (SGT) is investigating whether Zoom's AI tools unlawfully collect Illinois users' biometric information, including their voiceprint, without obtaining consent.
Who May Qualify
You may have a claim if all of the following apply:
- You are an Illinois resident.
- You were physically in Illinois when you joined a Zoom meeting.
- You joined a Zoom meeting (free or paid, personal or through work).
- Zoom’s “AI Companion” (also branded “Zoom AI”) was turned on during the meeting. Most guests see a pop-up that says “AI Companion has been turned on” when they join.
- You spoke during the meeting.
You may also have a claim if you never joined a Zoom meeting at all, but your voice was picked up while someone else in the room — a spouse, roommate, family member, or coworker — was on a Zoom call with AI Companion running.
Meetings from September 2023 to the present may qualify. If you attended a qualifying meeting before August 2, 2024, or after June 1, 2026, please tell us. It may affect how your claim is evaluated.
What We Are Investigating
Since 2023, Zoom has offered “AI Companion,” a set of AI features that produce meeting summaries, transcripts, and action items identifying who said what during a meeting. To attribute statements to individual speakers, the software analyzes the unique characteristics of each participant’s voice.
Our investigation indicates that this process generates a voiceprint, a mathematical representation of a person’s voice that can be used to identify them, for every person who speaks while the feature is running. That includes guests who never created a Zoom account, never saw Zoom’s terms of service, and were never asked for consent. Zoom’s own patents use the word “voiceprint” to describe this technology.
Guests who join a meeting with AI Companion running receive no notice that a biometric identifier is being collected, no explanation of how long it will be kept, and no opportunity to provide the written consent that Illinois law requires.
What the Law Says
The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), 740 ILCS 14/1 et seq., is the strongest biometric privacy law in the country. It specifically protects voiceprints, along with fingerprints, retina scans, and face geometry.
Before a private company may collect a voiceprint, BIPA requires it to:
- Inform the person in writing that a biometric identifier is being collected or stored
- Explain in writing the specific purpose and how long the data will be kept; and
- Obtain a written release signed by that person.
Companies must also publish a policy for permanently destroying biometric data.
BIPA provides $1,000 for each negligent violation and $5,000 for each intentional or reckless violation, plus attorneys’ fees. You do not need to show that you were harmed in any other way. The Illinois Supreme Court has held that the loss of control over your biometric data is itself the injury the law protects against. And because a voiceprint, unlike a password, can never be changed, the law treats its unauthorized collection as a serious and permanent intrusion.
Why Silver Golub & Teitell
SGT is at the forefront of biometric privacy litigation. In Zaluda v. Apple Inc., No. 2019 CH 11771 (Cir. Ct. Cook Cnty., Ill.), SGT represents a class of Illinois residents who allege that Apple collected their voiceprints through Siri without the consent BIPA requires. On January 29, 2026, the Circuit Court of Cook County certified that class, a group estimated to include millions of Illinois Siri users, finding that resolving the BIPA claims on a classwide basis is the most efficient and fair way to proceed.
Zaluda is one of the few voiceprint cases in the country to reach class certification, and the theory at its core — that the voice “feature vectors” a company computes to recognize speakers are voiceprints under BIPA — is directly relevant to the claims we are investigating against Zoom.