News Tech and Science

Texas sued Facebook parent Meta Platforms over facial recognition tech

EU wants to know how Meta tackles child sex abuse
Image: Logos of Facebook and Meta

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Meta Platforms over Facebook’s facial recognition technology, alleging that it violated the state’s privacy protections covering biometric data. Although Facebook used the technology in question for a long time, it no longer uses it.

Texas sued Meta Platforms over Facebook’s tech

Paxton filed the case in the state’s district court in Marshall. Sources reportedly told The Wall Street Journal that it seeks hundreds of billions of dollars in civil penalties. In a statement about the report that Texas had sued Meta Platforms, Paxton said the technology used by Facebook to capture facial geometric in photographs uploaded between 2010 and late 2021 led to “tens of millions of violations” of Texas law.

He added that the social network “has been secretly harvesting Texans’ most personal information… for its own corporate profit.” Paxton also pointed out that Texas law has prohibited the harvesting of such data from photos and videos without informed consent for more than two decades.

Further, he said that “while ordinary Texans have been using Facebook to innocently share photos of loved ones with friends and family, we now know that Facebook has been brazenly ignoring Texas law for the last decade.

Previous law

The social network did not response to the Journal’s request for comment. Facebook paid roughly $650 million to settle a previous lawsuit filed over its facial recognition technology. Illinois filed that case in 2015 under its biometric privacy law, which The Wall Street Journal said shares some similarities with Texas’ law.

Both states’ laws require companies to receive consent from individuals before capturing their biometric identifiers. Facebook argued that Illinois’ law didn’t apply to the method it used to identify users in photos and that it had allowed users to opt out of the feature. However, the social network failed to convince the judge to dismiss the class-action lawsuit and ended up settling in 2020.

 

About the author

Michelle Jones

Michelle Jones was a television news producer for eight years. She produced the morning news programs for the NBC affiliates in Evansville, Indiana and Huntsville, Alabama, and spent a short time at the CBS affiliate in Huntsville. She has experience as a writer and public relations expert for a wide variety of businesses. Michelle covers Breaking News at Insider Paper.







Daily Newsletter