In a privacy case involving facial recognition, Meta and Texas reach a $1.4 billion settlement.
According to officials, Meta has reached a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas in a privacy complaint involving claims that the tech giant exploited user biometric data without consent.
Texas's Austin Officials announced on Tuesday that Meta has reached a $1.4 billion adjustment with Texas in a alcove complaint on claims that the tech giant utilized user biometric data without consent.According to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, no state has ever obtained a larger compensation than this one. Regarding comparable claims made by users in Illinois, a judge authorized a $650 million settlement with the business, formerly known as Facebook, in 2021.The Republican Paxton said in a statement, " This historic agreement shows our determination to take on the largest tech companies." the world and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texans' privacy rights."
"We are happy to settle this matter, and look forward to investigating prospects in the future to increase our commercial holdings in Texas, possibly through the development of data centers.”The Texas case, which was filed in 2022, claimed that Meta had broken a state law that forbade the collection or sale of a resident's biometric data, such as their fingerprints or face, without that resident's consent.The corporation made the announcement in 2021 that it was discontinuing its facial recognition technology and erasing the fingerprints of over 1 billion individuals due to mounting worries regarding the technology's potential for abuse by authorities, law enforcement, and other groups.
At the time, almost one-third of Facebook's daily active users have chosen for the social network's algorithm to recognize their faces. Facebook debuted face recognition more than ten years ago, but as courts and regulators began to scrutinize the technology, the company progressively made it easier to disable the capability. In 2019, Facebook ceased recommending that users "tag" people in photographs that it recognized automatically. Instead, it asked users to select whether they wanted to utilize the face recognition capability.
In 2022, exas brought a comparable legal action against Google. According to Paxton's lawsuit, the search engine behemoth obtained millions of biometric identifiers through its goods and services, such as Google Photos, Google Assistant, and Nest Hub Max. These biometric identifiers included voiceprints and recordings of facial geometry. The lawsuit hasn't been resolved yet. It's doubtful that the $1.4 billion will have any impact on Meta's operations. Within the first three months of this year, the Menlo Park, California-based internet company generated a profit of $12.37 billion. Its sales came in at $36.46 billion, up 27% over the same period last year. On Wednesday, Meta is expected to release its second-quarter financial results
