Facial Recognition – Texas in a lawsuit against Meta: Allegedly, Facebook has illegally collected facial recognition data from millions of Texas residents for over a decade. And the US state has approached the court for redressal.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in Harrison County District Court in Texas, alleges that Facebook’s Facebook photo-tagging feature did not seek the consent of Texas residents before collecting facial recognition data. In this way, Facebook analyzed the appearance of non-Facebook users in the image and recommended that Facebook users tag different people, CNN reported.
Facebook’s tag recommendation feature is currently off.
In November 2021, just months after settling a 650 million class-action lawsuit against Facial Recognition in the US state of Illinois, Facebook announced that it would discontinue the feature. At that time, Facebook also promised to delete the data of about 800 million users collected in this way.
According to a lawsuit filed Monday by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Facebook has already collected billions of biometric data in violation of state consumer protection and biometric data privacy laws. Texas passed the Biometric Data Act in 2009, called the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifiers (QBI) Act.
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In response to the lawsuit, a spokesman for the Meta called the lawsuit “baseless” and called for a “strong defense”.
The lawsuit alleges that between 2010 and June 2011, Facebook secretly forced millions of Texas to join the facial recognition scheme without their consent. As a result, over the next 10 years, Facebook has captured the facial geometry records of millions of Texas residents from photos uploaded to Facebook.
The feature also identifies the faces of non-Facebook users from various images and collects biometric data. The lawsuit alleges that Facebook violated privacy under Texas law.
Although Facebook has suspended its facial recognition program, the lawsuit alleges that under Meta, “any other platform or activity, such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Reality Labs or its upcoming virtual-reality metaverse, will not respond.”
The lawsuit alleges that Meta was fined 25,000 dollars each for violating state biometric laws and10,000 dollars for each violation of the Texas Consumer Protection Act.
Paxton told a news conference he was seeking billions of dollars in damages.
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