2024-07-30 17:43:55
Meta has agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement with the US state of Texas in a confidential dispute. The allegation: The tech giant is said to have used users’ biometric data without their consent.
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the settlement was the largest ever reached by a state.
“This historic distribution demonstrates our commitment to stand up to the world’s largest technology companies and hold them accountable when they break the law and Privacy rights of Texans,” the official said.
Meta itself commented on the giant payment with the following statement: “We are happy to resolve this issue and we hope to explore future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including the possible development of data centers. “
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Unauthorized storage of biometric data
The Texas lawsuit, filed in 2022, accuses Meta of violating a state law that prohibits the collection or sale of residents’ biometric data, such as their face or fingerprints, without their consent.
In 2021, the company announced that it will shut down its facial recognition system and delete the facial prints of more than a billion people as concerns grow about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and other.
At that point, more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users agreed to have their faces recognized by the social network system. Facebook stopped automatically recognizing people in photos and suggesting “tagging” them in 2019. Instead, users are asked to decide for themselves whether they want to use facial recognition.
The current $1.4 billion settlement is not the first case of its kind in 2021, a judge approved a $650 million settlement with the company formerly known as Facebook over legitimate users in Illinois. It remains to be seen whether other US states will follow suit.
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