Meta agrees to $1.4B settlement with Texas in privacy lawsuit over facial recognition
Austin, Texas — Meta has agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas in a privacy lawsuit over claims the tech giant used users’ biometric data without their consent, officials said Tuesday.
According to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the settlement is the largest secured by a single state. In 2021, a judge approved a $650 million settlement with the company formerly known as Facebook over similar claims from users in Illinois.
“This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world’s largest tech companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating the privacy rights of Texans,” Paxton, a Republican, said in a statement.
Meta said in a statement: “We are pleased to have resolved this matter and look forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including the potential development of data centers.”
The Texas lawsuit, filed in 2022, alleged that Meta violated a state law that prohibits capturing or selling residents’ biometric data, such as their face or fingerprint, without their consent.
Company announced in 2021 that it would close the facial recognition system and the removal of the facial prints of more than 1 billion people, amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, law enforcement and others.
At the time, more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users had opted to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. Facebook had introduced facial recognition more than a decade earlier, but gradually made it easier to disable the feature as it came under fire from courts and regulators.
In 2019, Facebook stopped automatically recognizing people in photos and suggesting people to “tag” them. Instead of making that the default, Facebook asked users to choose whether to use the facial recognition feature.
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Lathan is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-reported issues.