Meta reached a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tuesday to settle a two-year-old lawsuit over the company’s use of facial recognition software.
“After tirelessly pursuing justice for our citizens whose privacy rights were violated by Meta’s use of facial recognition software, I am pleased to announce that we have reached the largest settlement ever obtained from a single state lawsuit,” Attorney General Paxton said in a statement. press release.
The massive settlement stems from a lawsuit filed in 2022 that alleged Meta’s past use of facial recognition technology violated state privacy protections. The plaintiffs alleged that Facebook collected millions of biometric identifiers from photos and videos that users uploaded through its automated photo tagging feature. The lawsuit also alleged that Facebook failed to disclose the practice to users and obtain their consent. At the time, Meta called the allegations “baseless.”
Neat feature with big privacy concerns
The lawsuit focused on a feature Facebook launched in 2011 called “tag suggestions,” which it claimed made it easier to tag photos with the names and accounts of people in the image. Facebook turned the feature on automatically for U.S. users. State attorneys general alleged that the feature ran facial recognition software on nearly every face on Facebook for nearly a decade. In 2019, Facebook made the system explicitly optional, but it was too little, too late.
By 2021, Facebook announced it would shut down its facial recognition systems and delete a massive trove of biometric data from more than a billion users. At the time, Facebook’s vice president of artificial intelligence, Jerome Pesenti, said facial recognition was a powerful tool, but noted the need to address “growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole.”
While the feature was interesting and somewhat useful to users, tag suggestions were probably more trouble than they were worth. In 2021, Facebook was ordered to pay $650 million to settle a class action lawsuit over the feature’s data collection practices.
“We are pleased to resolve this matter, and look forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including potential data center development,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch.
Meta has agreed to pay the state of Texas $1.4 billion over five years, with the first $500 million payment due next month, according to Court file.