Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta in a lawsuit over the company's facial recognition software.
According to Paxtons office', the lawsuit was brought to stop the company from capturing and using the personal biometric data of millions of Texans "without the authorization required by law."
Meta claimed at the time the lawsuit was filed that it was "without merit."
"This settlement is the largest ever obtained from an action brought by a single State," Paxton's office said in a press release. "Further, this is the largest privacy settlement an Attorney General has ever obtained, dwarfing the $390 million settlement a group of 40 states obtained in late 2022 from Google. This is the first lawsuit brought and first settlement obtained under Texas’s 'Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier' Act and serves as a warning to any companies engaged in practices that violate Texans’ privacy rights."
Attorney General Paxton vowed to continue meeting any privacy violations from big tech companies with the "full force of the law." 🚨BREAKING NEWS: We have secured a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta to stop the company’s practice of capturing and using the personal biometric data of millions of Texans without the authorization required by law.
This settlement is the largest ever obtained from an action… pic.twitter.com/AkOppAGO0K
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) July 30, 2024
“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. “This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world’s biggest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texans’ privacy rights. Any abuse of Texans’ sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law.”
The press release explains:In 2011, Meta rolled out a new feature, initially called Tag Suggestions, that it claimed would improve the user experience by making it easier for users to “tag” photographs with the names of people in the photo. Meta automatically turned this feature on for all Texans without explaining how the feature worked. 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. Meta did this despite knowing that CUBI forbids companies from capturing biometric identifiers of Texans, including records of face geometry, unless the business first informs the person and receives their consent to capture the biometric identifier. After only approximately two years since filing the petition, Texas reached a settlement agreement with Meta. The company will pay the state of Texas $1.4 billion over five years.
A spokesperson for Meta told The Hill on Tuesday, "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."
