Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) announced he has won a $1.4 billion settlement from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta over privacy-related concerns involving Facebook capturing Texan users’ facial and biometric data without their knowledge or consent.
“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,” Paxton said in a Tuesday X/Twitter post.
“This settlement is the largest ever obtained from an action brought by a single State and the largest privacy settlement an Attorney General has ever obtained,” Paxton added. “This serves as a warning to any companies engaged in practices that violate Texans’ privacy rights.”
In his post, the attorney general shared a press release further elaborating on the settlement and the case.
In February 2022, Paxton “sued Meta for unlawfully capturing the biometric data of millions of Texans without obtaining their informed consent as required by Texas law,” the press release explains.
“Specifically, Meta’s data collection violated Texas’ ‘Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier’ Act (CUBI) and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act,” Paxton said.
For more than a decade, Meta had been collecting “capturing records of the facial geometry” of users via its new “Tag Suggestions’ feature, which the tech giant rolled out in 2011,” the press release stated.
Meta claimed Tag Suggestions “would improve the user experience by making it easier for users to ‘tag’ photographs with the names of people in the photo,” but the company “automatically turned this feature on for all Texans without explaining how the feature worked,” the statement continued.
“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 added in his press release.
“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,” Paxton said.
The $1.4 billion settlement, which Paxton noted is the largest ever obtained by a single state against a company, will be paid out over the course of five years.
“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,” Paxton said. “Any abuse of Texans’ sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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