Texas Sues Meta for Illegal Use of Face Recognition

The American state of Texas is taking Meta (formerly known as Facebook) to court over the use by the social networking giant of facial recognition technology. According to Ken Paxton, Texas Attorney General, this is a violation of state law, as no informed consent has ever been properly collected from those whose biometric data have been captured for over ten years. The US state will demand financial compensation for any damages such misconduct might have incurred.

The Attorney General says it is time to forbid big-tech companies such as Meta to utilize dishonest business practices to receive income by compromising the safety and well-being of other people and their children. He thereby refers to Meta using specialized algorithms trained to identify a person when someone wants to add a username tag to a photo. The system then automatically recognizes people on the photograph by analyzing various biometric identifiers of their faces and comparing those to over a billion digital face representations currently stored in the Meta database.

Texas is one of three US states to use a biometric privacy law, the other two being Washington and Illinois. In November 2021, the network already had to disable the controversial tool in Illinois following a class-action lawsuit that cost the company $650 million to settle. Furthermore, Meta assured it would also delete the biometric data of at least 600 million users included in the program.

For the moment, however, Meta does not think the accusations of the state of Texas to be fair and intends to defend their position in court.

What do you have to say on the subject of face recognition software being used without the person’s explicit consent? Do you find Meta’s tagging system helpful? Speak up in the comments and share this post with others!