Meta Agrees to Pay Texas $1.4 Billion to Settle Biometric Lawsuit

The Texas Attorney General is making big headlines and while he is not running for election this year, you can count on him bringing this up next time.

Meta has agreed to pay Texas $1.4 billion or about one percent of its annual revenue (plus likely a tax deduction) for using facial recognition on Texas users without their permission.

While many people are familiar with the Illinois biometric privacy law, Texas has had one also since 2009. The Texas Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier (CUBI) Act prohibits the capture or use of biometric data. The AG also says they violated the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

The Texas lawsuit claims that Meta released a feature called Tag Suggestions which would allow users to “more efficiently” tag photos of people whose names they did not know. Obviously, if you know someone you don’t need Meta to tell you who they are, so the only use of this feature is to violate someone’s privacy.

For more than a decade, Facebook ran facial recognition on every face in any photo uploaded to Facebook and did not tell users about that. The “Tag Suggestions” feature was on by default.

It seems that there probably is nothing illegal about doing this, but you can’t do it without telling people and getting their permission. Neither of those things were high on Facebook’s priority list.

It is unclear it Facebook has insurance for this or how much, but Zuckerberg probably did not want this to go to trial. A trial would capture the general media’s attention for a much longer time. This news item will be gone next week. Credit: The Record

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