Whole Foods will pay nearly $300,000, as Business Insider reports, to settle another lawsuit, this time over a system that requires warehouse workers to “speak into a computer system that records their voices.”
The Amazon-owned grocery chain uses this system— the outlet adds— to make and track work assignments. Various employees have claimed that it captured their “voiceprints” without their consent, in violation of an Illinois privacy law. Here’s what we know:
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More Details About The Whole Foods Lawsuit Settlement
The grocer would pay $297,000 to current and former employees who worked in a Whole Foods warehouse in Chicago— and "used headsets to record their voices" while completing tasks— as first reported by Bloomberg Law.
Law360 also reported that the class-action settlement received "preliminary approval from a circuit court" in Cook County, Illinois. Affected workers would receive payments of approximately $545 each, according to the outlet.
At Whole Foods warehouses, Business Insider notes, "employees are given a headset that they wear while at work." They then use these headsets to "talk to a computer, telling it when they have completed tasks and listening for directions."
The headsets, the publication goes on, are a "substitute for screen-based systems" and "free up employees' hands and eyes with voice-guided workflows," as seen on the website of Honeywell, the company that manufactured the very headsets that the Whole Foods warehouses use.
Workers' Complaint: 'Capturing Biometric Information'
The chain uses this debated system at their warehouses since "it increases the overall efficiency at distribution and fulfillment centers by identifying the individual's voice patterns as they give commands," the workers argued, according to the lawsuit's original complaint.
At the Chicago warehouse in question, workers were apparently required to send in recordings of their voices before they were able to start using the system so that it could understand them, per the complaint. Those recordings, which are called "voiceprints" in the lawsuit, are "biometric data," the plaintiffs said, similar to a person's fingerprints.
"Whole Foods had to provide workers at the warehouse with information on how their voiceprints would be kept and treated under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA," Business Insider adds.
The problem was that the workers "were never first asked for their consent, nor were they ever provided with a written policy regarding the use of their biometric identifiers as required under BIPA," their complaint reads. "Moreover, they were never told whether their voiceprints would be deleted from the Defendant's systems or when they would be deleted," according to the complaint.
