Mike Peterson
Texas's attorney general has filed a lawsuit against Meta that claims Facebook's facial recognition policies resulted in "tens of millions" of state privacy violations.
The lawsuit, which was filed in a Texas district court on Monday by Attorney General Ken Paxton, focuses on the company's capture of biometric data in user-uploaded photos. Facebook carried out the practice from 2010 until November 2021, when it shut down the program.
"Facebook has been secretly harvesting Texans' most personal information— photos and videos— for its own corporate profit," Paxton said in a statement. "Texas law has prohibited such harvesting without informed consent for over 20 years."
Meta said the claims are "without merit" and added that it would defend itself "vigorously."
At the time, Facebook's practice focused on identifying users in photos and automatically notifying them if they appeared in photos or videos uploaded by another person.
Texas is seeking civil penalties that could amount in the hundreds of billions of dollars, a person familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.
In 2020, Facebook settled a prior lawsuit in Illinois over its facial recognition practices for around $650 million. After the settlement became known to the public, Texas sent a civil subpoena to the social media juggernaut inquiring about the facial recognition system.
Along with shutting down the automatic facial recognition, Facebook also said that it would limit the use of the technology and delete all stored facial data.
Texas state law prohibits the capturing of biometric identifiers without a person's informed consent. It also bars companies from sharing that biometric data.
While the Texas law can only be enforced by the state attorney general, it provides for a penalty of up to $25,000 per violation. Back in 2021, there were an estimated 20 million Texans on Facebook, the complaint claims.
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40 Comments
This is the same Texas state government that has made drastic changes to voting laws to try and reduce the number of citizens that can successfully cast a vote in the state.
AI, your videos are sooo annoying and hard to dismiss!! My brain has developed a mental association with your videos as being annoying, even though I don't often watch them.
First, I always have to pause the videos because I'm trying to focus on reading the article, the video often has nothing to do with the article! Then, while scrolling, the video pops out again and sticks to the far right side of my screen. And as if that's not enough, the X sits right behind the scroll bar so I have to wait until the scrollbar disappears before I am able to click it!
Do you have someone on your team that can fix the experience and plan for a successful roadmap for your videos effort? I don't think your videos are meeting a desired objective, unless that objective is to be super annoying!
Does anyone mind if my post is relevant to the article?
Hundreds of billions in penalties? Divide that by the population of Texas (30 million) and you get about $10,000 per citizen in Texas.
Hopefully illegal immigrants would not be eligible for any of that money.