On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced, on X, a $1.4 billion settlement with social media giant Meta over that company’s gathering of biometric data.
🚨BREAKING NEWS: We have secured a $1.4 billion settlement with Meta to stop the company’s practice of capturing and using the personal biometric data of millions of Texans without the authorization required by law.
This settlement is the largest ever obtained from an action… pic.twitter.com/AkOppAGO0K
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) July 30, 2024
AG Paxton said in the announcement:
This settlement is the largest ever obtained from an action brought by a single State and the largest privacy settlement an Attorney General has ever obtained.
This serves as a warning to any companies engaged in practices that violate Texans’ privacy rights.
Further, in the attached official press release, AG Paxton explained the data-gathering that prompted the lawsuit:
In 2011, Meta rolled out a new feature, initially called Tag Suggestions, that it claimed would improve the user experience by making it easier for users to “tag” photographs with the names of the people in the photo. Meta automatically turned this feature on for all Texans without explaining how the feature worked. Unbeknownst to most Texans, for more than a decade Meta ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photographs uploaded to Facebook, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted. Meta did this despite knowing that CUBI forbids companies from capturing biometric identifiers of Texans, including records of face geometry, unless the business first informs the person and receives their consent to capture the biometric identifier.
This isn’t the first time Meta has been forced to backtrack.
Previously on RedState: Meta Suddenly Eases Guardrails on Trump Facebook/Instagram Accounts to Protect ‘Political Expression’
Big Tech Puts Its Thumb on the Scale Once Again: Facebook Admits It Censored Iconic Trump Photo
Maintaining our privacy rights is one of the major challenges of the internet era. The Information Revolution has come with many advantages. Still, the power wielded by social media companies is a downside, and the illicit gathering of personal data is one of the foremost avenues for abuse of that power. This has resulted in an arms race between fraudsters, identity thieves, giant social media platforms like Meta (formerly Facebook,) and the various levels of government – not to mention the users.
Meta has been accused of many more unacceptable actions besides this illicit biometric data-gathering. They have been accused of limiting political discussion through selective editing and censorship, prompting several states to take legal action against the company – although earlier this month the Supreme Court tossed a chock under the wheels of those actions.
As always, the ultimate recourse lies with the users. The internet is a treasure trove of information and, while one frequently has to winnow a lot of chaff to find a grain or two of wheat, it is, in the end, up to users to determine what, if any, data-gathering or other unacceptable actions these companies are taking, and to refuse to use their services if they discover such actions.
Yes, that means reading the User Agreement.
For now, privacy rights have been handed a victory, and it’s not an inconsiderable one. This is a win for Texans and hopefully will set a precedent for the other states.
