Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, will pay a whopping $1.4 billion to Texas over the next five years after it settled a lawsuit filed in 2022 over its facial recognition feature, TechCrunch reported.
The feature in question was called Tag Suggestion. Facebook rolled it out in 2011 to provide quick suggestions for users to tag their friends on the photographs they publish. As the Texas Attorney General"s Office explained:
“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.”
CUBI stands for Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act, which was signed into law back in 2009, two years before the introduction of the Tag Suggestion feature.
“This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world’s biggest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texans’ privacy rights. Any abuse of Texans’ sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law,” commented Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
This settlement is the largest ever obtained from an action brought by a single U.S. state. The previous record holder was Google, which had to pay far less – $390 million – to a group of 40 states in late 2022.
As TechCrunch reminded, Facebook made the feature explicitly opt-in in 2019; however, that didn’t save the company from being responsible for the prior decisions made during the years before.