The Texas attorney general filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:FB) for its longstanding and discontinued use of facial-recognition technology that violated that state’s privacy protections for personal biometric data, the Wall Street Journal reports.
- The suit also alleged Facebook has obtained patents for systems “where consumers wandering in stores or standing at checkout counters have their faces scanned and matched with their social-networking profiles.”
- WSJ notes that the lawsuit filed in state district court in Marshall by Texas AG Ken Paxton sought civil penalties in billions of dollars. The state seeks a $25,000 civil penalty for each violation of the Use of Biometric Identifier Act and $10,000 for each violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Consumer Protection Act.
- Paxton said the company’s capture of facial geometry in photographs that users uploaded from 2010 to late last year resulted in “tens of millions of violations” of Texas law.
- “Facebook has been secretly harvesting Texans’ most personal information—photos and videos—for its own corporate profit,” Mr. Paxton said. “Texas law has prohibited such harvesting without informed consent for over 20 years. 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.”
- Facebook had shut the Face recognition system in November 2021. “We’re shutting down the Face Recognition system on Facebook,” the company said in a blog post, explaining that it would “delete more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.”
- Price Action: FB shares traded lower by 1.51% at $216.25 on the last check Monday.
