This past Monday, Ken Paxton, the Republican Attorney General of Texas, has officially filed a lawsuit targeting Facebook, now named Meta, for its alleged capture and use of the b iometric data of millions of people in Texas without acquiring the proper informed consent from them.
Facebook has saved multiple millions of the biometric identifiers “contained in photos and videos uploaded by friends and family who used the social media app,” as stated in a statement put forth by Paxton’s office.
Today, I filed a #BigTech lawsuit against Facebook ⬇️
Facebook cannot take advantage of people and their children with the intent to turn a profit at the expense of one’s safety and well-being.https://t.co/NW0yp4oBCP
— Texas Attorney General (@TXAG) February 14, 2022
By doing this, Facebook knowingly exploited the personal information of its users in order to acquire profit, asserted the lawsuit. The actions alleged by the lawsuit are in direct violation of the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act of Texas.
“Facebook will no longer take advantage of people and their children with the intent to turn a profit at the expense of one’s safety and well-being,” exclaimed Paxton. “This is yet another example of Big Tech’s deceitful business practices and it must stop. I will continue to fight for Texans’ privacy and security,” continued Paxton.
The lawsuit was officially filed in the 71st Judicial District in Harrison County, Texas.
The lawsuit goes a bit further to allege that Facebook capture other sets of biometric data from non-users, which resulted in impacts for many more Texans.
“Facebook’s illegal and deceptive conduct did not end with its users. For Texans who did not use Facebook’s social-media services, Facebook was still capturing hundreds of millions of biometric identifiers from photos and videos innocently uploaded by friends and family who did use Facebook. There was no way for such non-users to know of or contest this exploitation,” read the suit.
The lawsuit went on to highlight the “staggering” nature of these violations from Facebook because of the sheer number of times it carried out these violations.
“The scope of Facebook’s misconduct is staggering. Facebook repeatedly captured Texans’ biometric identifiers without consent not hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times — but billions of times,” read the suit.
Facebook has previously announced the end of the use of its facial recognition system back in November in the wake of a class-action lawsuit from Illinois.
“Facebook previously settled another lawsuit over its facial-recognition practices for about $650 million. That class-action suit filed in 2015 was brought under Illinois’s biometric privacy law, which is similar in some respects to the Texas law,” stated The Wall Street Journal.
The penalty for the law in Texas could cost well over $25,000 per violation. The suit puts forth an estimation that over 20 million Texans made use of Facebook accounts in 2021.
This event is not Paxton’s first rodeo in regard to fighting against Big Tech. Back in 2020, Paxton headed up a 10-state legal challenge targeting Google concerning a series of allegations of anti-competitive conduct in its advertising.
“It isn’t fair that Google effectively eliminated its competition and crowned itself the head of online advertising,” claimed Paxton in a video posted to Twitter. “Let me put it this way: If the free market were a baseball game, Google positioned itself as the pitcher, the batter and the umpire.”
#BREAKING: Texas takes the lead once more! Today, we’re filing a lawsuit against #Google for anticompetitive conduct.
This internet Goliath used its power to manipulate the market, destroy competition, and harm YOU, the consumer. Stay tuned… pic.twitter.com/fdEVEWQb0e
— Texas Attorney General (@TXAG) December 16, 2020