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Texas sues Facebook parent Meta over facial recognition privacy

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Following arguments about a Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s challenge to a Texas statute that prohibits abortion after six week in Washington, U.S. November 1, 2021, Paxton leaves U.S. Supreme Court.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuitFacebook parent company MetaOn Monday, it was accused of unlawfully collecting biometric information on users without their permission.

Similar claims were made in a Facebook class action. settled for $650 million last year. The case alleges that Facebook stored data on Illinois residents without their consent in order to create photo tags.

Facebook declared in November that it will shut down its facial recognition systemThe system recognizes faces and suggests users tag them. According to the company, individual facial recognition templates will be deleted for over 1 billion people.

Texas’ lawsuitFacebook claims it violated state law because it did not obtain informed consent from users to store their biometric data, and failed to remove that data after a reasonable amount of time. These rights were violated by Facebook for Texans, even though they did not use its services. The company allegedly collected facial identifiers from photos posted to Facebook.

Texas claims Facebook broke the law and gathered facial recognition data billions of time without consent.

For each illegal collection of a biometric identifier or disclosure of it to a 3rd-party, or failure to destroy that data promptly, Texas can impose a $25,000 civil penalty. Texas also claims Facebook infringed Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The suit asks for an additional $10,000 civil fine for each violation.

Paxton stated Monday at a press conference that penalties could total in the millions of dollars.

Texas claims that Facebook promoted its tag suggestion feature, and that the users were not aware that, by accepting or rejecting tags they were helping to train Facebook’s artificial intelligence to recognize these faces.

According to the plaintiffs, Facebook violated Texas’ privacy policies and put Texans at great risk.

According to the suit, “Unlike other identifications such as Social Security numbers which are easily stolen or misappropriated but biometric identifiers cannot be modified, they are permanent.” Bad actors can gain access to and use the biometric identifiers for the remainder of their victim’s lives once they are captured.

Meta didn’t immediately reply to our request for comment regarding the Texas lawsuit.

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