Privacy
Mass Data Scraping and Privacy
Collecting personal information at scale from websites, apps and public sources without notice or consent, and using it to build or operate a commercial system.
Pleaded in 8 of the 98 matters on this docket
Governing law
Common law privacy torts; Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code 17200; Cal. Penal Code 502 (CDAFA); state biometric statutes where face or voice data is involved
Damages
Restitution and injunctive relief under the UCL; statutory damages only where a specific statute supplies them.
Limitations period
Two to four years depending on the claim pleaded.
Reference material about publicly available law, current as of the date this file was compiled. It is not legal advice and it does not describe anyone’s particular situation. Statutes and limitations periods vary by jurisdiction and change.
Matters pleading this claim
Amer v. ElevenLabs
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (Eastern Division) · 1:26-cv-05437
ElevenLabs text-to-speech and voice-cloning foundation models allegedly trained on scraped broadcast, podcast and audiobook recordings
Filed 2026-05-11 · Class Action
ActiveCousart / A.T. v. OpenAI
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California · 3:23-cv-04557-VC
ChatGPT and OpenAI model training data; Microsoft integrations
Filed 2023-09-05 · Class Action
DismissedP.M. v. OpenAI
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California · 3:23-cv-03199-TLT
ChatGPT / GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 (OpenAI); Microsoft integrations
Filed 2023-06-28 · Class Action
DismissedACLU v. Clearview AI
Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois
Clearview AI faceprint database compiled from images scraped from social media and the public web
Filed 2020-05-28 · Individual Action
SettledKatz-Lacabe v. Oracle
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (settlement affirmed by the Ninth Circuit) · 3:22-cv-04792-RS (N.D. Cal.); No. 24-7648 (9th Cir.)
Oracle Advertising / Data Cloud — third-party cookies, device identifiers, embedded widgets and purchased broker data assembled into consumer profiles
Filing date not established · Class Action
SettledIn re Clearview AI
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (Eastern Division) · 1:21-cv-00135
Clearview AI facial recognition search engine built on approximately 50 billion images scraped from the public internet
Filing date not established · Class Action
On AppealVance v. Microsoft
U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington · 2:20-cv-01082 (C20-1082JLR)
IBM 'Diversity in Faces' research dataset of ~1 million annotated Flickr face images, distributed free for non-commercial bias research
Filing date not established · Class Action
DismissedVance v. Amazon
U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington · 2:20-cv-01084 (C20-1084JLR)
IBM 'Diversity in Faces' research dataset derived from Flickr Creative Commons images
Filing date not established · Class Action
Dismissed