Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (Republican) announced that Facebook has won a $1.4 billion settlement from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta over privacy concerns about the company’s collection of facial and biometric data from Texas users without their consent.
“We secured a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta to stop the company from collecting and using the personal biometric data of millions of Texans without legal authorization,” Paxton said in a X/Twitter post on Tuesday.
🚨BREAKING: We won a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta to stop the company from collecting and using the personal biometric data of millions of Texans without legal authorization.
The settlement is the largest ever obtained in a litigation… pic.twitter.com/AkOppAGO0K
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) July 30, 2024
“This settlement represents the largest settlement ever obtained in a single state lawsuit and the largest privacy settlement ever obtained by an attorney general,” Paxton added. “It should serve as a warning to companies who engage in practices that violate the privacy rights of Texans.”
In his post, the Attorney General shared a press release that provided further details about the settlement and the lawsuit.
According to a press release, Paxton sued Meta in February 2022, “alleging that the company illegally collected biometric data of millions of Texans without obtaining informed consent as required by Texas law.”
“Specifically, Mehta’s data collection violates Texas’ ‘Capture or Use of Biometric Information’ law (CUBI) and the Unfair Trade Practices Act,” Paxton said.
For more than a decade, Meta has been “capturing a record of your face geometry” through a new “tag suggestion feature” that the tech giant introduced in 2011, according to a press release.
Meta argued that tag suggestions “improve the user experience by allowing users to easily ‘tag’ photos with the names of people in them,” but the company “automatically turned the feature on for all Texans without explaining how it would work,” the statement continued.
“Unknown to most Texans, for over a decade Mehta has been running facial recognition software on nearly every face in photos uploaded to Facebook, recording the facial shapes of people in the photos,” Paxton added in the press release.
“Mehta did so knowingly because CUBI prohibits companies from capturing biometric information from Texans, including records of facial geometry, unless the company provides prior notice to the individual and obtains their consent to the collection of that information,” Paxton said.
Paxton noted that the $1.4 billion settlement, the largest ever won by a single state against a company, will be paid out over five years.
“This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world’s largest technology companies and holding them accountable for violating the law and violating the privacy rights of Texans,” Paxton said. “Any misuse of Texans’ sensitive data will be met with the force of the law.”
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