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The Street
The Street
Ross Kohan

Meta settles facial recognition lawsuit for $1.4 billion

Transcript:

Conway Gittens: I’m Conway Gittens reporting from the New York Stock Exchange. Here’s what we’re watching on TheStreet today.

Nervousness during the busiest week of earnings season knocked the Nasdaq lower, but the Dow was in rally mode. Sales and profits at PayPal topped forecasts and JetBlue swung to a surprise quarterly profit.

Wall Street is awaiting the Federal Reserve’s latest decision on interest rates. Chairman Jerome Powell is expected to lay the groundwork for a September rate cut when the two-day meeting wraps up Wednesday.

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Turning now to other headlines: A record $1.4 billion. That’s how much Facebook parent Meta has agreed to pay to settle a facial recognition lawsuit with the state of Texas.

The lawsuit claimed Facebook was using facial recognition technology to illegally gather biometric data on millions of Texans. The information was extracted, without users’ legal permission, from photos and videos posted on the site.

“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,” according to the office of Texas State Attorney General Ken Paxton.

If you’ve ever used the tag feature on a Facebook post, it's likely your biometric information ended up stored on Facebook’s servers.

Even though Meta got rid of Facebook’s tag suggestion feature and announced in 2021 it was shutting down its facial recognition system, It continues to say it did nothing wrong.

That’ll do it for your Daily Briefing. From the New York Stock Exchange, I”m Conway Gittens with TheStreet.

Related: Zuckerberg makes a bold statement about Facebook's newest innovation

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