Texas : legal suit on Facebook facial recognition
What is the news:
- The Texas Attorney General is suing Facebook’s parent company, saying it collected biometric data on Texans for commercial purposes without their informed consent.
- Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit Monday in a state district court. The suit claims Facebook parent Meta has been “storing millions of biometric identifiers” — identified as retina or iris scans, voice prints, or a record of hand and face geometry — contained in photos and videos people uploaded to its services, including Facebook and Instagram.
- “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,” Paxton said in a statement. “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.”
- The filing of the lawsuit coincided with the first day of early voting in a primary election in Texas, where Paxton faces several GOP challengers in the wake of his top deputies reporting him to the FBI for alleged corruption.
- Paxton has been going up against “Big Tech” — a common foe for both Republicans and Democrats even if their criticisms don’t always align. He earlier launched an investigation of Twitter over its ban of former President Donald Trump and filed several lawsuits against Google.
- Under Texas law, the lawsuit says, companies must obtain “informed consent” from people to use their biometric data. This means people have to be informed before their biometric data is captured and it can only be done if they agree to it. Such data also cannot be disclosed for anyone else, although there are some exceptions, such as in cases where a law enforcement subpoena issued.
Use of AI for “Tag” friends feature
- In a statement, a spokesperson for Meta Platforms Inc., which is based in Menlo Park, California, said the lawsuit was “without merit” and that the Texas law in question had never been enforced in the past.
- The company said in November that it was shutting down its facial recognition program and deleting most of its data.
- Previously, the feature made templates of user’s faces and compared them to other photos and videos posted on the platform, which allowed Facebook to notify users when they appeared in someone else’s photo or video and prompted users to “tag” friends and family that the AI identified.
- Facebook still uses the system in a limited capacity, such as allowing users to gain access to locked accounts and verifying their identity for financial products.
- Texas is asking the court to fine Meta $25,000 for each violation of the informed consent rule and $10,000 for each violation of the state’s deceptive trade practices act.
Not the first time:
- This isn’t the first time that Meta has faced legal action for its facial recognition practices. Last March, Facebook was ordered to pay $650 million for running afoul of an Illinois law designed to protect the state’s residents from invasive privacy practices.
- That law, the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), is a powerful state measure that’s tripped up tech companies in recent years. The suit against Facebook was first filed in 2015, alleging that Facebook’s practice of tagging people in photos using facial recognition without their consent violated state law.
- Following the ruling,1.6 million Illinois residents received at least $345 under the final settlement ruling in California federal court. The final number was $100 million higher than the $550 million Facebook proposed in 2020, which a judge deemed inadequate. Facebook disabled the automatic facial recognition tagging features in 2019, making it opt-in instead and addressing some of the privacy criticisms echoed by the Illinois class-action suit.
- A $650 million settlement would have been enough to significantly impact any normal company, but Facebook brushed it off as it did with the FTC’s record-setting $5 billion penalty in 2019 following its probe into the social media giant’s privacy issues.
- The new Texas lawsuit shows that widespread privacy laws could have a significant impact not only on Meta’s operations but also on all big technology companies’ practices. In the past years, a cluster of lawsuits has accused Microsoft, Google and Amazon of breaking laws when users’ faces were used to train their facial recognition systems without explicit consent.
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