'Brazenly Ignoring' the Law: Texas Sues Facebook for Using Facial Recognition to Harvest Personal Information

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Facebook (now known as Meta) this week over the company’s use of facial recognition technology in “secretly harvesting Texans’ most personal information,” which Paxton says is in violation of the state’s privacy protections.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against Facebook this week. The lawsuit is over Facebook’s now supposedly discontinued use of facial recognition technology which allegedly violated the state’s privacy protections relating to personal biometric data.

Ken Paxton (Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 17: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies remotely during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled, “Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election” on Capitol Hill on November 17, 2020 in Washington, DC. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is also scheduled to testify remotely. (Photo by Hannah McKay-Pool/Getty Images)

The lawsuit was filed in state district court in Marshall. The suit is seeking civil penalties in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars. Paxton said in a statement that the company’s recording and storage of facial geometry in photographs that users uploaded to the platform from 2010 to 2021 resulted in “tens of millions of violations” of Texas state law.

Paxton said in a statement:

Facebook has been secretly harvesting Texans’ most personal information—photos and videos—for its own corporate profit. Texas law has prohibited such harvesting without informed consent for over 20 years.

While ordinary Texans have been using Facebook to innocently share photos of loved ones with friends and family, we now know that Facebook has been brazenly ignoring Texas law for the last decade.

Facebook has faced legal trouble over its facial-recognition practice in the past. The company previously settled another lawsuit over the tech for around $650 million. Texas alleges that Facebook’s facial-recognition system ignored the state’s legal requirements for recording users’ facial features.

A draft of the complaint seen by the Wall Street Journal, states: “For over a decade, while holding itself out as a trusted meeting place for Texans to connect and share special moments with family and friends, Facebook was secretly capturing, disclosing, unlawfully retaining—and profiting off of—Texans’ most personal and highly sensitive information: records of their facial geometries, which Texas law refers to as biometric identifiers.”

Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address [email protected]

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