EAST ST. LOUIS – Illinois residents who placed calls to other states can’t sue about the calls in Illinois, Chief U.S. District Judge Nancy Rosenstengel ruled on Sept. 18.
She dismissed a potential class action alleging that Pindrop Security and Amazon Web Services misused voice identification technology.
“Nothing about this process occurred in Illinois except for the initial dialing of the phone by plaintiffs,” she wrote.
Attorney Andrew Schlichter of St. Louis filed the action in Madison County circuit court last December, for Christine McGoveran, Joseph Valentine, and Amelia Rodriguez.
Plaintiffs claimed Pindrop violated state privacy law in its analysis of recordings from a call center of insurer John Hancock.
They claimed Amazon Web Services broke the law as provider of cloud storage.
They sought $5,000 for each intentional or reckless violation, or $1,000 for each negligent violation.
Amazon Web counsel Elizabeth Herrington of Chicago removed the action to district court in January.
Herrington argued the amount in controversy exceeded the $5 million limit for state court jurisdiction under federal class action law.
Pindrop counsel Jordan Heinz of Chicago moved to dismiss the action in February.
Heinz wrote that plaintiffs impermissibly sought damages arising from a financial institution’s entirely lawful use of Pindrop’s technology.
He challenged jurisdiction, writing that plaintiffs didn’t allege facts regarding any acts Pindrop committed in Illinois.
Herrington moved to dismiss Amazon Web in March, claiming John Hancock’s contact with Illinois couldn’t establish jurisdiction over the insurer’s vendor.
Schlichter opposed Pindrop’s motion to dismiss in May, claiming it improperly collected data from Illinois citizens using Illinois phone numbers in Illinois.
He cited cases where judges kept jurisdiction over defendants who reached into a state to contact plaintiffs.
Rosenstengel rejected the citations and wrote, “Plaintiffs were the ones who made the call, to John Hancock, from their Illinois phone numbers.”
She found Pindrop didn’t own or operate any office or server in Illinois and didn’t integrate with Amazon Web in Illinois.
She located Amazon Web data centers in Virginia, Ohio, California, and Oregon.
She dismissed the class action complaint without prejudice to individual claims of McGoveran, Valentine and Rodriguez.