Meta to pay $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over facial recognition and photo tags

Texas announced a monolithic colony with Meta implicit the usage of facial designation connected Facebook, resolving a suit filed successful 2022 claiming that tag suggestions connected photos uploaded to Facebook violated the state’s Capture oregon Use of Biometric Identifier Act (CUBI) and Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Meta has agreed to wage $1.4 cardinal implicit 5 years to settee the suit, State Attorney General Ken Paxton’s bureau said today.

It’s the largest colony ever resulting from an enactment brought by a azygous state, according to Paxton. It’s besides the archetypal suit and colony nether CUBI and serves arsenic a informing to different companies successful usurpation of the state’s privateness rights, helium says.

“Any maltreatment of Texans’ delicate information volition beryllium met with the afloat unit of the law,” Paxton said successful a press release.

At contented are suggestions Facebook made for tagging radical connected photos. “In 2011, Meta rolled retired a caller feature, initially called Tag Suggestions, that it claimed would amended the idiosyncratic acquisition by making it easier for users to “tag” photographs with the names of radical successful the photo,” according to the property release.

That was 2 years aft Texas passed the CUBI Act, which prohibits companies from capturing biometric information similar look geometry without receiving anterior informed consent. Facebook turned connected tag suggestions automatically — “capturing and utilizing the idiosyncratic biometric information of millions of Texans without the authorization required by law,” the lawyer general’s bureau says.

The suit initially sought $25,000 successful civilian penalties per CUBI usurpation positive an added $10,000 per usurpation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, The Verge antecedently reported. Those penalties could person reached hundreds of billions of dollars, the Wall Street Journal reported successful 2022.

“We are pleased to resoluteness this matter, and look guardant to exploring aboriginal opportunities to deepen our concern investments successful Texas, including perchance processing information centers,” Meta spokesperson Christopher Sgro said successful an email.