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The state of Texas is suing Facebook’s parent company Meta. In a lawsuit it has alleged that Facebook unlawfully captured the biometric data of Texans for commercial purposes without their informed consent.
The suit was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the state district court Monday and wants Facebook to pay penalties for violating Texas’s state privacy laws.
In November 2021, Facebook announced that it would scale back its facial recognition system and delete over a billion users’ facial maps or geometries. The announcement came a few months after Facebook agreed to pay $650 million over a privacy lawsuit that was filed in Illinois.
This lawsuit also concerned facial-recognition technology and it argued that Facebook violated Illinois’s privacy laws by not asking for users’ consent before using this technology to scan photographs uploaded by them.
This facial recognition technology was able to identify people in photographs uploaded on Facebook and suggested users to tag people in them. In this way, photos could be linked to the tagged person’s profile.
The lawsuit mentions that one of the most prevalent uses of biometric identifiers used by Big Tech is facial-recognition technology. It goes on to say that other than the “innocuous” uses of the technology for unlocking devices, it is a “favourite” of stalkers and criminals who are able to locate a potential target’s name, social-media account and other personal information if they have access to his or her photograph.
It alleges that Facebook has a pattern of betraying users, by promising privacy to them while secretly disclosing personal information to third parties. Particularly, the lawsuit takes issue with Facebook’s feature called “tag suggestions”, which was announced in 2010.
The feature was discontinued last year but when it was active it worked by using Facebook’s facial-recognition technology to capture and analyse records of facial geometry of both users and non-users, which were obtained through user-uploaded photographs and videos, the lawsuit notes.
These face geometries would then be used by Facebook to compare the faces to those in the photos and videos on Facebook’s database.
Paxton said in a statement, “Facebook has been storing millions of biometric identifiers (defined by statute as “a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or record of hand or face geometry”) contained in photos and videos uploaded by friends and family who used the social media app.”
“By this illegal activity, Facebook exploited the personal information of users and non-users alike to grow its empire and reap historic windfall profits. The company repeatedly captured biometric identifiers without consent billions of times,” Paxton added.
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