Meta has agreed a $1.4bn settlement with the State of Texas for unlawfully capturing and using biometric data of millions of Texans.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton revealed the agreement, which is the largest ever privacy settlement in the US, in a statement on July 30, 2024.
Meta will make payments over the next five years and will stop the practice of capturing personal biometric data of Texans.
The settlement concludes a lawsuit brought by Paxton in February 2022, which alleged that Meta unlawfully captured Texans’ biometric data without obtaining their informed consent, breaching Texas’s Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier (CUBI) Act and The Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
Paxton commented: “This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world’s biggest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texans’ privacy rights. Any abuse of Texans’ sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law.”
Meta’s Illegal Biometric Data Capture
The lawsuit relates to the Tag Suggestions feature on Facebook, owned by Meta, which was rolled out in 2011. This made it easier for users to ‘tag’ photographs with the names of people in the photo.
Facebook ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photographs uploaded to the social media platform, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted.
This process was undertaken without informing or obtaining the consent of Facebook users.
In the 2022 lawsuit, the State of Texas accused the tech giant of “exploiting the personal information of users and non-users alike to grow its empire and reap historic windfall profits.”
Meta said in a statement that it was pleased to resolve this matter and alluded to future investments in Texas, including potentially developing data centers.
The previous highest privacy settlement was when Google agreed to pay $391.5m to a group of 40 states over the firm’s location tracking practices.
In June 2024, Meta voluntarily paused plans to train its large language models (LLMs) using public content shared on Facebook and Instagram after privacy concerns were raised by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC).