HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Fireflies.AI Meeting Assistant Allegedly Collected Biometric Voice Data from Illinois Meeting Participant Without Consent

November 18, 2025

On November 18, 2025, Fireflies.AI reportedly recorded and analyzed the voice of Illinois resident Katelin Cruz during a virtual meeting hosted by Western Illinois Dreamers, although Cruz had no Fireflies account and had not provided written consent. Her lawsuit alleges the system used speaker-recognition functions to create and retain biometric voice data and attribute statements to her in the meeting transcript.

The incident raises concerns about responsible AI practices, highlighting the need for robust governance and safeguards to prevent such incidents. Through contributors—JOIN US—to learn more about Project Cerebellum and its efforts in promoting trustworthy AI, Cruz's case serves as a catalyst for reflection on the importance of informed consent and biometric data protection.

As the conversation around AI governance continues, it is crucial that developers and policymakers prioritize harm prevention and implement effective guardrails to ensure accountability. By doing so, we can work towards creating safe and secure AI systems that respect users' autonomy and rights.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
western-illinois-dreamers, organizations, ai-transcription-tool-users
Alleged developer
fireflies.ai, ai-transcription-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
privacy, people-recorded-without-consent, katelin-cruz, biometric-data-subjects

AI governance case studies

For forensic AI governance failure analysis (TAIMScore™ case studies), browse Human Signal’s Failure Files™.

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1651

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.