Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that Meta has reached a record $1.4 billion settlement to resolve a lawsuit brought by the state of Texas over the improper usage of users’ biometric data by the owner of Facebook.
According to the Attorneys for Texas, whose team included the plaintiffs’ firm Keller Postman, the terms of the settlement were the largest agreement ever reached by a single state.
Paxton sued Meta in state court in 2022, claiming the company had been utilising face recognition software on images posted to Facebook without permission from Texans.
According to Paxton, Meta, the company then known as Facebook, introduced a “tag” function in 2011 that used software that could identify and categorise faces in images.
IBM did this by automatically activating the function without explaining how it operated.
This breached both the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act and a 2009 state statute limiting the use of biometric data.
“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.
Newsng understands that Paxton’s office filed the first lawsuit under a 2009 state legislation protecting Texans’ biometric data, such as fingerprints and facial scans.
The law compels enterprises to educate and obtain consent from individuals before collecting such information.
It also restricts the sharing of this information, except in specific circumstances such as assisting law enforcement or completing financial transactions.
Businesses must secure this data and destroy it within a year of it no longer being needed.
We earlier reported that Meta has been fined $220 million by the Nigerian government for allegedly breaking local consumer, data protection, and privacy laws.
