The lawsuit, filed in state district court in Marshall by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seeks civil penalties in the hundreds of billions of dollars, according to a person familiar with the matter.
In a statement, Mr Paxton said the capture of facial geometry in photos uploaded by the company from 2010 to the end of last year resulted in “millions of violations” of Texas law.
“Facebook is secretly harvesting Texans’ most personal information—photos and videos—for its corporate profit,” Mr. Paxton said. “Texas law has prohibited such harvesting without informed consent for more than 20 years. While ordinary Texans have been using Facebook to innocently share photos of their loved ones with friends and family, now We know that Facebook has been openly ignoring Texas law for the past decade.”
In a statement, Meta said the claims against Facebook are “without merit and we will vigorously defend ourselves.”
Meta says that before it decided to discontinue its facial recognition system, users were always provided with notice and an opportunity to consent to use those services.
Facebook previously settled another lawsuit over its facial recognition practices for nearly $650 million. That class-action suit, filed in 2015, was brought under Illinois’ biometric privacy law, which is similar to Texas law in some respects. Both laws require the consent of individuals before their biometric identifiers can be captured.
In the class-action case, Facebook’s lawyers said Illinois law does not apply to its method of identifying users in photos. The company also said that it has given users the ability to opt out of the feature.
Facebook’s efforts to dismiss the class-action case were unsuccessful, and the company settled the matter in 2020.
The Texas lawsuit—particularly the size of the civil penalty being sought—points to the effect that increasingly broad privacy laws can have on the operations of large tech companies.
The case shows that “states and individuals have a major role in protecting the privacy,” said John Davison, senior attorney at the Center for Electronic Privacy Information, a research and advocacy group.
“We Can’t Trust Congress and Even the FTC” [Federal Trade Commission] To stay on top of every data abuse, Mr. Davison said. “It is important that there are other avenues as well.”
Following Facebook’s settlement of the Illinois class-action case, Texas sent the company its own civil subpoena asking for information about the facial recognition system. Facebook announced that it was ending its facial recognition system last November.
US District Judge James Donato wrote in the class-action case, “These procedural safeguards are particularly important in our digital world because technology now allows the bulk collection and storage of an individual’s unique biometric identifiers – identifiers that can be compromised or misused.” Being there cannot be changed.” “When an online service simply disregards Illinois procedures, as alleged by Facebook, the individual’s right to maintain biometric privacy vanishes over the air.”
Texas says Facebook’s facial recognition system ignored state legal requirements to capture users’ facial features.
“For more than a decade, as a trusted meeting place for Texans to connect and share special moments with family and friends, Facebook has been secretly capturing Texans’ most personal and highly sensitive, was disclosing, illegally maintaining and profiting. Information: records of the geometry of their faces, which Texas law refers to as biometric identifiers,” the state argues in the complaint.
Texas law makes it illegal to capture people’s biometric identifiers without their informed consent and prohibits the sharing of that information.
Unlike Illinois law, which led to class-action suits, Texas law can only be enforced by the state’s attorney general. Texas law also provides a $25,000 fine for violations. The complaint estimated that at least 20 million Texans were Facebook members in 2021.
The civil subpoena issued by Texas called for all of the material that Facebook produced in response to the class-action lawsuit.
Facebook’s announcement that it would stop using its facial recognition system cited public concern over the technology. “We are discontinuing the face recognition system on Facebook,” the company said in a blog post, explaining that it will “remove the personal facial recognition templates of more than one billion people.”
It said that “the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology.”
Texas officials have said in their lawsuit that they are seeking the recovery of civil penalties for past violations of the law and that they will try to prevent any future inappropriate uses—suggesting that the meta may still be collected. May retain some facial recognition data.
“Facebook announced in November 2021 that it would stop using the face-recognition feature on its Facebook social-media platform,” the complaint said. “Facebook has made no such commitment in relation to any other platform or operation under its corporate umbrella, such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Reality Labs, or its upcoming virtual-reality metaverse.”
Announcing in a blog post that it was ending its use of facial recognition, Facebook said it would “continue to work on these technologies and engage outside experts …[But] In the midst of this ongoing uncertainty, we believe it is appropriate to limit the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases.”
The Texas suit also states that Facebook has obtained a patent for a system “where consumers walk into stores or stand at checkout counters, with their faces scanned and matched to their social networking profiles.”
Mr Paxton brought in two outside companies – Keller Lenkner LLC and McCool Smith PC – to help because the case against Meta is complex and raises technical issues, he said. He said the case was filed in the state court in Marshall because the technology has become a popular alternative to litigation.
The Texas investigation may have slowed the shutdown of at least some facial recognition systems. Following the company’s announcement in early November, Texas officials demanded that relevant data be preserved during the state’s investigation.
In a follow-up letter on November 10, Texas officials said Facebook confirmed that Meta “will not remove any source code related to Facebook’s facial recognition system,” and will “preserve all metadata related to the system”. Including sufficient data to identify the data. Texas users, which users had facial recognition enabled, and which users had facial templates saved.
10 letter from the Texas Attorney General’s office, Facebook said it believed the face templates themselves were not physical and could be removed. The Attorney General’s office expressed concern about this, and demanded that META not remove any face template information for past or current residents of Texas.
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