Meta will pay a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over facial recognition and picture tagging

The Met and the state of Texas have reached a huge settlement over the "tag suggestion" feature Facebook added to photos more than a decade ago. Texas announced a massive settlement with the Met over Facebook's use of facial recognition, settling a 2022 lawsuit that alleged a "tag suggestion" feature used in photos uploaded to Facebook violated the state's Capture or Use of Biometric Identifiers (CUBI) and deceptive marketing laws practices. ". Action. Meta has agreed to pay $1.4 billion over five years to settle the lawsuit, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office announced today. According to Paxton, it is the largest settlement ever reached in a single state lawsuit. He says it is also the first trial and settlement under Cube and acts as a warning to other companies in violation of private privacy rights.

"Any abuse of Texan's secret data will be executed with a complete power of law," Paxton said in a press release. These are the suggestions prepared for Facebook for people to mark photos. "In 2011, threw a new feature originally called roof suggestions, which would have been improved by the user's experience, making users easier to" photography with the words of the image people, "said press press release in a press release Two years ago, Texas passed the CUBI Act, which prohibits companies from collecting biometric data, such as facial geometry, without prior informed consent. The attorney general's office said that Facebook's automated tag recommendations "collected and used the personal biometric data of millions of Texans without authorization of legal claims." Initially, the lawsuit claimed a civil fine of $ 25,000 and breached each Texas Deats Deats Convention law with $ 10,000. According to the Wall Street Journal, these fines could reach hundreds of billions of dollars. The company does not recognize any wrong behavior in reconciliation. In 2017, Facebook introduced "Opening/Level" control with label suggestions, which was replaced by a wider face recognition settings in 2019. Then, it stopped automated facial tagging in photos in 2021.

“We 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,” Meta spokesperson Christopher Sgro said in an email. Meta's privacy procedures have been under increased scrutiny from regulators across the world following the Cambridge Analytica crisis in 2018, which revealed that a political consultant inappropriately obtained the personal information of 87 million Facebook users. In 2019, Meta consented to a $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.