Walmart is again in the biometric-privacy crosshairs, this time over voiceprints rather than the palm scanners that cost it $10 million in a 2021 settlement, according to Top Class Actions. The specifics of the new filings — plaintiffs, jurisdiction, which statute is invoked — are thin in the initial report, but the theory is familiar: companies that capture a customer’s or employee’s voice for identification, authentication, or AI transcription purposes without the disclosures and written consent required by biometric privacy statutes can be on the hook for statutory damages, no proof of actual harm required.
The most likely vehicle is Illinois’ BIPA, which explicitly lists “voiceprint” alongside retina, fingerprint, and face-geometry scans as regulated biometric identifiers, and which has generated more than 2,000 class actions between 2017 and 2023, per Spencer Fane’s analysis of the law’s history. Even after Illinois capped damages to $1,000 or $5,000 per person rather than per violation in an August 2024 amendment, BIPA remains, in Spencer Fane’s words, the most punitive biometric statute on the books — and voiceprint capture through customer-service calls, voice-ordering kiosks, or AI assistants is exactly the kind of routine, high-volume data collection that turns a compliance gap into a class of thousands.
Voiceprints are no longer a niche biometric identifier — they’re the byproduct of nearly every AI customer-service deployment retailers are racing to install.
The broader regulatory backdrop makes this more than a one-off nuisance suit. Texas’s attorney general just extracted a record $1.4 billion settlement from Meta under the state’s Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act, the largest settlement any state AG has secured, Spencer Fane reported. And the National Law Review has flagged voiceprint capture via AI transcription as an emerging exposure point for any business layering AI assistants onto customer or employee interactions, citing the $51.75 million Clearview AI settlement in 2025 as evidence of how quickly biometric liability can scale once a company processes data from millions of individuals.
For retailers and data-driven enterprises, the practical lesson is that biometric exposure is expanding faster than compliance programs are adapting. Voice AI, smart-glasses pilots, and facial-recognition-based loss prevention all generate biometric identifiers under an increasing patchwork of state laws — Illinois, Texas, Washington, and others — often without the kind of visible consent flow that would satisfy a regulator or a plaintiff’s lawyer. Watch for whether the new Walmart suits name BIPA specifically, whether they target voice-based customer service or an AI assistant rollout, and whether Walmart settles quickly, as it did in 2021, or tests the pleadings — a decision that will shape how aggressively the plaintiffs’ bar pursues voiceprint claims against other large retailers.
Walmart faces biometric privacy lawsuits over alleged collection of customers' voiceprints
