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Meta will pay Texas $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit regarding the unauthorized collection and use of people's biometric data.
In 2022, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Meta for unlawfully collecting facial-recognition data on millions of Texans via its "Tag Suggestions" feature, which suggested friends for you to tag when you uploaded photos of them.
This violated Texas' Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act (CUBI), which forbids companies from capturing biometric identifiers without consent, Paxton claimed.
"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," Paxton said today.
The $1.4 billion deal is the largest settlement ever obtained by a single state and will be paid over five years, Paxton said. It tops a $650 million settlement Facebook paid in 2021 to resolve a similar biometric violation in Illinois.
A Meta spokesperson tells CNBC: "We are pleased to resolve this matter and look forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including potentially developing data centers."
Facial-recognition for photo tagging on Facebook dates back to 2010, when it was pretty common for people to photo dump dozens of photos from a night out. (How many of us woke up to emails back then that said "Friend A tagged you in 96 photos on Facebook"?) But the privacy complaints outweighed the benefits. Meta shut down Facebook's facial-recognition system in late 2021, and said it would delete the template used to recognize people in photos.
Paxton also sued Google in 2022 for similar violations through various products, including Google Photos and Google Assistant. That case is ongoing, CNBC says.