Meta loses bid to end BIPA voiceprint suit as case moves forward A federal judge in California rejected Meta Platforms’ attempt to end a biometric privacy lawsuit over voice recordings collected through Facebook and Messenger, finding that evidence about Meta’s own voice processing technologies and its ability to connect audio files with user accounts creates a factual dispute over whether the recordings could be used to identify people. Illinois resident Natalie Delgado, who brought the lawsuit in 2023 under the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), filed a motion August 21 asking U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California to certify an Illinois class. A hearing on class certification is scheduled for December 18. BIPA expressly protects “voiceprints” as biometric identifiers, along with fingerprints, retina or iris scans and scans of hand or face geometry. But the statute does not define what makes recorded speech a voiceprint rather than simply an audio recording. Meta argued that distinction should end Delgado’s case. According to the company, the audio files it received through Facebook and Messenger were merely voice recordings. To identify a speaker, Meta argued, a recording would first have to be processed into different data representing characteristics of the speaker’s voice, which it called an “Output Representation.” That representation would then have to be compared with data linking it to a known person. Meta said it had not created such representations from Delgado’s recordings and did not possess information linking the voices in her uploaded recordings to her identity. Illston concluded the evidence was not that simple. The central question under BIPA, she said, was not whether Meta had used Delgado’s voice recordings to identify her. Citing a 2024 Ninth Circuit ruling involving Meta’s facial recognition technology, she said the relevant issue is whether the biometric