In response to the suit, a Meta spokesperson said: “These claims are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”
By Brian Fung| CNN Texas is suing Facebook’s parent company, Meta (FB), over allegations the social media giant illegally harvested the facial recognition data of tens of millions of state residents for a decade. The lawsuit, filed Monday in Texas’s Harrison County District Court, argues that a now-shuttered Facebook photo-tagging feature failed to get Texans’ informed consent before gathering their facial recognition data. The feature worked by analyzing faces in photos, including those of non-Facebook users, and recommending that Facebook users tag the people that the tool identified. Facebook announced it would discontinue the tool in November 2021, months after it settled a groundbreaking class-action lawsuit in Illinois over the same issue for $650 million. At the time, Facebook said it would also delete the data it had collected from at least 600 million users who had been a part of the program. By that point, according to Monday’s suit by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Facebook had already collected biometric data in violation of the state’s consumer protection and biometric data privacy law billions of times.
