Meta will pay a record $1.4 billion to settle a biometrics-related lawsuit in Texas.
In a Tuesday (July 30) news release, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the settlement was the largest ever from an action brought by a single state, and is the largest privacy settlement obtained by an attorney general.
According to the release, the settlement will stop Meta’s practice of “capturing and using the personal biometric data of millions of Texans without the authorization required by law.”
Paxton sued Meta in 2022, accusing the company of capturing millions of Texans’ biometric data without their consent.
“In 2011, Meta rolled out a new feature, initially called Tag Suggestions, that it claimed would improve the user experience by making it easier for users to ‘tag’ photographs with the names of people in the photo,” the release said. “Meta automatically turned this feature on for all Texans without explaining how the feature worked.”
The release adds that Meta — unbeknownst to most people in Texas — spent more than a decade using facial recognition software on essentially every face contained in the photographs uploaded to Facebook, despite knowing that state law forbids this practice unless a business gets a person’s consent.
PYMNTS has contacted Meta for comment but has not received a reply. A report on the settlement Tuesday by CNBC included this statement from the company:
“We are pleased to resolve this matter, and look forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including potentially developing data centers.”
The settlement comes at a time of heightened privacy concerns surrounding facial recognition, as PYMNTS wrote in May.
At the time, Microsoft had just updated its code of conduct to prevent its artificial intelligence (AI) service from being used for facial recognition purposes by or for U.S. law enforcement.
“Microsoft is banning it because, as a whole, there is still some hesitancy and trepidation regarding the use of facial recognition by police,” Bob Eckel, CEO of biometric solutions provider Aware, told PYMNTS. “Some argue that facial recognition fosters discrimination by being less accurate for certain races, nationalities and ethnicities. However, this is not true.”
Underlining the advancements in facial recognition accuracy, Eckel added, “Today’s facial recognition tools are tested and validated by trustworthy third parties, and certain states require police agencies using facial recognition to only use software deemed to be at least 98 percent accurate across all demographics.”
