Meta Agrees to $1.4 Billion Settlement with Texas in Facial Recognition Privacy Suit

Austin, Texas — Meta has agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas in a privacy lawsuit over allegations that the tech giant used users’ biometric data without their permission, officials said Tuesday.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the settlement is the largest secured by a single state. In 2021, a judge approved a US$650 million deal with the company, formerly known as Facebook, over similar claims from users in Illinois.

“This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world’s largest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating the privacy rights of Texans,” Paxton, a Republican, said in a statement.

Meta said in a statement: “We are pleased to resolve this matter and look forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including data centers potentially in development.”

Filed in 2022, the Texas lawsuit alleged that Meta violated a state law that prohibits the capture or sale of a resident’s biometric information, such as their face or fingerprint, without their consent.

The company announced in 2021 that it was closing its facial recognition system and eliminate the facial prints of more than a billion people, amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.

At the time, more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users had chosen to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. Facebook introduced facial recognition more than a decade earlier, but gradually made it easier to opt out of the feature as it faced scrutiny from courts and regulators.

Facebook in 2019 stopped automatically recognizing people in photos and suggesting people “tag” them, and instead of making that the default, it asked users to choose whether they wanted to use its facial recognition feature.

The $1.4 billion is unlikely to impact Meta’s business. The Menlo Park, California-based technology company made a profit of $12.37 billion in the first three months of this year. Its revenue was US$36.46 billion, an increase of 27% compared to the previous year. Meta is scheduled to release its second-quarter earnings results on Wednesday.

Meta shares fell $4.06 to $461.65 on Tuesday, a decline of less than 1%.

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AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed to this report.

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Lathan is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report to America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to cover undercovered issues.