Texas Sues Meta After Facebook’s Facial-Recognition Results in ‘Billions’ of Violations
By Movieguide® Staff
The Texas attorney general’s office recently sued Meta’s Facebook over the app’s use of facial recognition and violations of the state’s privacy protections, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
According to the lawsuit, Facebook used users’ data without their consent. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who filed the suit on Feb. 14, said that Facebook made “tens of millions of violations” under Texas law.
“Facebook has been secretly harvesting Texans’ most personal information—photos and videos—for its own corporate profit,” Mr. Paxton said. “Texas law has prohibited such harvesting without informed consent for over 20 years. While ordinary Texans have been using Facebook to innocently share photos of loved ones with friends and family, we now know that Facebook has been brazenly ignoring Texas law for the last decade.”
Facebook allegedly used photos and videos of users for the past 12 years.
“This is yet another example of Big Tech’s deceitful business practices and it must stop. I will continue to fight for Texans’ privacy and security,” Paxton added in a statement.
A Meta spokesperson said: “These claims are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”
However, in November, the company announced that it deleted more than a billion people’s information after shutting down a facial recognition system, according to Reuters.
“The scope of Facebook’s misconduct is staggering,” the lawsuit read. “Facebook repeatedly captured Texans’ biometric identifiers without consent not hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times — but billions of times.”
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