The Texas attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit against Meta’s Facebook on Monday, alleging that the social media company violated state privacy laws by using facial-recognition technology to collect the biometric data of millions of Texans without their permission.
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Facebook is accused of gathering biometric information from images and videos shared by users without their knowledge, revealing the information to others, and failing to destroy it within a reasonable time frame, according to the lawsuit.
“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,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement.
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The case was initially reported by the Wall Street Journal, which quoted a source close to the situation as claiming the state was seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in civil penalties.
In November, the business announced that it was shutting down a facial recognition technology and deleting the data of over a billion users in a blog post. Concerns about the technology’s use were noted, as well as a lack of clarity about the rules governing its use.
It also agreed to pay $650 million in 2020 to settle a lawsuit brought by the state of Illinois over identical issues.
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As per the current lawsuit, 20.5 million Texans have a Facebook account, which was filed in state court in Marshall, Texas.
“The scope of Facebook’s misconduct is staggering,” the lawsuit said. “Facebook repeatedly captured Texans’ biometric identifiers without consent not hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times — but billions of times,” the lawsuit said.