Meta to pay $1.4 billion in Texas unauthorized facial recognition lawsuit

By Alimat Aliyeva

The authorities of the state of Texas (USA) announced an agreement with Meta, under which it will pay the state $ 1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit filed against the company in February 2022, Azernews reports.

According to the information, the state accused Meta of violating the Biometric Data Protection Act. The company recognized the faces of Texas Facebook users from photos and videos and stored this data without asking their permission.

"Without notifying many residents of Texas, the company has been performing facial recognition using special software for more than a decade. This was done with almost every person in the photos that were uploaded to Facebook, so the company collected and stored biometric data of all the people in these photos," said state Attorney Ken Paxton.

It is noted that the company began doing this after the introduction in 2011 of the Tag Suggestions function, which automatically recognized faces and invited users to mark their friends in the photo.

The prosecutor's office emphasizes that the company did this knowing about the existence of a law in the state of Texas prohibiting companies from collecting and storing biometric data of local residents without their consent.

In 2021, the company agreed to pay $650 million in a similar lawsuit by the authorities of the State of Illinois.