Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the state had secured a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta over its “unauthorized capture of personal biometric data.”

“We have secured a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta to stop the company’s practice of capturing and using the personal biometric data of millions of Texans without the authorization required by law,” Paxton said.

“This settlement is the largest ever obtained from an action brought by a single State and the largest privacy settlement an Attorney General has ever obtained. This serves as a warning to any companies engaged in practices that violate Texans’ privacy rights,” he added.

🚨BREAKING NEWS:  We have secured a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta to stop the company’s practice of capturing and using the personal biometric data of millions of Texans without the authorization required by law.
 
This settlement is the largest ever obtained from an action… pic.twitter.com/AkOppAGO0K

— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) July 30, 2024

Spectrum News reports:

Specifically, Paxton says the data was collected in violation of Texas’ Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

In November 2021, Facebook said it was shutting down its face-recognition system and deleting the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.

More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. That’s about 640 million people. Facebook introduced facial recognition more than a decade ago but gradually made it easier to opt out of the feature as it faced scrutiny from courts and regulators.

Facebook in 2019 stopped automatically recognizing people in photos and suggesting people “tag” them, and instead of making that the default, asked users to choose if they wanted to use its facial recognition feature.

Researchers and privacy activists have spent years raising questions about the tech industry’s use of face-scanning software, citing studies that found it worked unevenly across boundaries of race, gender or age.

Meta agrees to $1.4B settlement with Texas for biometric data usage in Facebook imageshttps://t.co/Lj7lV6XOa9

— KXAN News (@KXAN_News) July 30, 2024

BREAKING: Texas officials say Meta agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement over claims the tech giant used biometric data without permission. https://t.co/FYggq12SFM

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 30, 2024

From the Associated Press:

Meta said in a statement: “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.”

Filed in 2022, the Texas lawsuit said that Meta was in violation of a state law that prohibits capturing or selling a resident’s biometric information, such as their face or fingerprint, without their consent.

“This is by far the biggest state governmental privacy settlement in history,” Chicago-based class action attorney Jay Edelson said in an email. Edelson’s firm filed the lawsuit that settled for $650 million with Meta. The only other larger claim is the Federal Trade Commission’s $5 billion settlement with the company in 2019.

To date, Meta has now paid over $2 billion in settlements for biometric privacy claims, according to Edelson. “That is a huge signal to other companies that they should be extremely careful if they want to trade in individuals’ biometric information,” he said.

The company announced in 2021 that it was shutting down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.