Meta agrees to $1.4B settlement with Texas
Posted/updated on: August 18, 2024 at 5:56 amAUSTIN (AP) â Meta has agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas in a privacy lawsuit over allegations that the tech giant used biometric data of users without their permission, officials said Tuesday.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the settlement is the largest secured by a single state. In 2021, a judge approved a $650 million settlement with the company, formerly known as Facebook, over similar allegations of users in Illinois.
âThis historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the worldâs biggest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texansâ privacy rights,â Paxton, a Republican, said in a statement.
Meta said in a statement: âWe 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.â
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.
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.
At the time, more than a third of Facebookâs daily active users had opted in to have their faces recognized by the social networkâs system. Facebook introduced facial recognition more than a decade earlier 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 âtagâ them, and instead of making that the default, asked users to choose if they wanted to use its facial recognition feature.
Texas filed a similar lawsuit against Google in 2022. Paxtonâs lawsuit says the search giant collected millions of biometric identifiers, including voiceprints and records of face geometry, through its products and services like Google Photos, Google Assistant, and Nest Hub Max. That lawsuit is still pending.
The $1.4 billion is unlikely to make a dent in Metaâs business. The Menlo Park, California-based tech made a profit of $12.37 billion in the first three months of this year, Its revenue was $36.46 billion, an increase of 27% from a year earlier. Meta is scheduled to report its second-quarter earnings results on Wednesday.
Metaâs stock slipped $4.06 to $461.65 Tuesday, a decline of less than 1%.