Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, agreed to a record $1.4 billion settlement with the U.S. state of Texas over allegations that it illegally collected biometric data of millions of users without their permission, marking one of the largest penalties levied by regulators against the tech giant.
“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,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said. “Any abuse of Texans’ sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law.”
The development arrived more than two years after the social media behemoth was sued for unlawfully capturing facial data belonging to Texas without their informed consent as is required by the law. The Menlo Park-based company, however, did not admit to any wrongdoing.
Tag Suggestions, as the feature was originally called when it was introduced in 2010, was marketed as a way for users to easily tag photos shared on Facebook with the names of people in them. However, it was enabled by default without giving adequate explanation as to how it worked.
The lawsuit accused Meta of violating the state’s Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier (CUBI) Act and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
“Unbeknownst to most Texans, for more than a decade Meta ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photographs uploaded to Facebook, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted,” according to a press statement from the Attorney General’s office.
“Meta did this despite knowing that CUBI forbids companies from capturing biometric identifiers of Texans, including records of face geometry, unless the business first informs the person and receives their consent to capture the biometric identifier.”
In November 2021, Meta said it was discontinuing its “Face Recognition” system altogether and deleting a huge collection of more than a billion users’ facial recognition templates as part of a wider initiative to limit the use of the technology across its products.
That same year, it agreed to pay a $650 million settlement in a 2015 class-action lawsuit in Illinois under the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) over similar allegations related to its face-tagging system.
Meta is not the only party being targeted by Texas over the collection of biometric data. The state also sued Google in October 2022 for allegedly violating the same biometric privacy law by gathering voice and facial data through products like Google Photos, Google Assistant, and Nest Hub Max. The case is currently underway.