A February 2022 case by General Ken Paxton charged Meta after they captured and used the biometric data of millions of Texas users without legally required permissions. Ken Paxton said the Meta settlement is the major privacy settlement by a United States state.
“After vigorously pursuing justice for our citizens whose privacy rights were violated by Meta’s use of facial recognition software, I’m proud to announce that we have reached the largest settlement ever obtained from an action brought by a single State,” said Attorney General Paxton. Attorney General Paxton has focused on holding major technology businesses accountable, initiating several historic initiatives like antitrust lawsuits.
“In 2011, Meta produced a new feature named ”Tag Suggestions”. This new feature would improve the user experience. It would make it easier for users to ”tag” photos with the names of people in the photo. Meta turned on this feature for all Texans without the Facebook privacy settlement announcing how the feature worked. Texans uploaded photos on Facebook, capturing many of the facial geometry of the people pictured. CUBI forbids organizations from capturing Texans’ biometric identifiers. They must notify the person and receive the approval to capture the biometric identifier.
Regulators and consumers have scrutinized Meta and other tech giants for privacy violations. States like Illinois, Texas, and Washington have biometric privacy laws and made a Meta settlement. The Meta settlement previously made by Illinois suits the company for facial recognition with $550 million. Also, there was a Facebook settlement and an Instagram one. They were due to the unfair trapping of teenagers and children on the platform while misleading the public about the hazards.
“Unbeknownst to most Texans, for more than a decade Meta ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photographs uploaded to Facebook, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted,” Paxton’s office said about the Facebook privacy settlement.
The Meta lawsuit didn’t accept any offense in the Facebook settlement. The quantity of the Facebook settlement is a part of Meta’s earnings, which totaled $139 billion in 2023. “We are pleased to resolve this matter, and look forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including potentially developing data centers,” a Meta spokesman said in a statement.
A Facebook privacy settlement said it no longer uses the ”tag suggestions” feature. Also, in 2022, Texas sued Google for breaching the same biometric privacy law. The state said, as in the Meta lawsuit, Google collected voice and facial data through products like Nest, the home device.
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