Meta reached a $1.4 billion deal to settle claims brought by the Texas attorney general over allegations that the social media giant flouted state privacy laws when it collected millions of users’ biometric data without their consent.
The lawsuit, which targeted Meta’s use of facial recognition software, has resulted in the largest privacy settlement obtained by a state attorney general, according to the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
“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 in a statement. “Any abuse of Texans’ sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law.”
Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2022, Paxton filed a lawsuit alleging that Meta knowingly violated the state’s Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act and Deceptive Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act by implementing a now-defunct facial-recognition-based photo and video tagging feature. Texas law says it’s illegal for private entities to capture, disclose or profit from someone’s biometric identifiers without their informed consent. The state also requires tech companies to store biometric information for a limited amount of time.
Texas prosecutors argued that Meta in 2011 rolled out a feature designed to make it easier for users to “tag” photographs with the names of people in the image without explaining how the technology worked. “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,” the state attorney general’s office said in a statement.
Meta, which operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is facing several lawsuits filed by states that argue the company’s services harm children, keep users addicted and compromise privacy. Dozens of state attorneys general and school districts have accused the tech giant of using manipulative practices to keep kids hooked on its services while showing them harmful content. In May, relatives of victims of the Uvalde school shooting sued Meta for facilitating aggressive firearms marketing campaigns on social media to vulnerable young people.
Meta’s privacy practices have faced intense scrutiny from regulators around the world after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, when revelations surfaced that a political consultancy improperly accessed personal data of 87 million Facebook users. Meta agreed in 2019 to a $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.
Last year, the European Union fined Meta a record $1.3 billion after finding that the company broke its privacy laws by transferring user data from Europe to the United States.