Texas sues Meta over its use of facial recognition from 2010 to late 2021 in the state; source says Texas seeks hundreds of billions of dollars in penalties
Wall Street JournalJohn D. McKinnon
Context & Ripple Effects
Texas’s case became a consequential state-level biometric-privacy challenge to Meta: the dispute was later resolved through Meta’s $1.4 billion settlement with Texas. Texas subsequently brought a separate suit over Google’s alleged collection of facial and voice-recognition data, extending the enforcement approach beyond one platform.
The reported penalty demand made the case significant not only for Meta’s past facial-recognition practices, but for how aggressively Texas could use consent-based biometric claims against major consumer-tech services.
First-order effects
Meta faces a Texas enforcement action tied to facial-recognition use over more than a decade, with the state reportedly seeking civil penalties on an unprecedented scale.
Texas gains a high-profile vehicle to test whether alleged collection of Texans’ biometric data without consent can produce large state-level penalties.
Second-order effects
Other consumer platforms using facial, voice, or related biometric features face stronger pressure to document consent practices, particularly as Texas later pursued similar biometric-data allegations against Google.
The size of the reported demand raises the financial and legal stakes of resolving biometric-data claims, giving Texas greater leverage in negotiations with large platforms.
Third-order effects
The later $1.4 billion Google settlement with Texas indicates that state biometric and privacy enforcement can become a durable source of platform liability, rather than a one-company dispute.
If this enforcement pattern persists, product decisions around biometric features will be shaped increasingly by state-specific consent requirements and the litigation exposure attached to historical data practices.
The trend: US states are using biometric-data and privacy claims to impose material accountability costs on major consumer platforms over long-running data collection practices.
Texas is suing Meta Platforms over Facebook's use of facial-recognition technology, seeking civil penalties that a person familiar with the matter says range in the hundreds of billions of dollars $FB https://www.wsj.com/...
Facebook has been secretly harvesting Texans' most personal info—photos & videos—for its own corporate profit. #TX law has prohibited such harvesting without informed consent for over 20 years. I'll hold Facebook accountable for its tens of millions of violations of TX law. https…
FB/Meta settled what sounds like a similar lawsuit for $650m in Illinois in 2020, so not shocked to see other states go after them on this FB said it would stop using facial recognition for photos and videos last November https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Even stiff potential penalties like w/ this TX suit won't be sufficient - the destruction of the data AND the models that were trained with it is needed. If you don't have both elements, as @FTC did with EverAlbum, incentives will remain high to eat the cost. https://twitter.com/…
The Texas attorney general filed a privacy suit against Meta on Monday, claiming the company, motivated by profit, illegally harvested the biometric data of millions of Texans without their consent. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ ...
Today, I filed a #BigTech lawsuit against Facebook ⬇️ Facebook cannot take advantage of people and their children with the intent to turn a profit at the expense of one's safety and well-being. https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/ ...
‘While holding itself out as a trusted meeting place for Texans to connect & share special moments w/family & friends, @Facebook was secretly capturing..records of their facial geometries..biometric identifiers,’ @KenPaxtonTX's suit vs. Meta says. #txlege https://www.wsj.com/...
Texas is suing Facebook's parent, Meta, in what appears to be a multibillion-dollar lawsuit over facial recognition. Texas alleges Facebook's now-defunct photo-tagging feature collected biometric data in violation of state law billions of times. https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/ …