Meta settles Texas facial recognition suit with $1.4 billion deal

Meta’s facial-recognition-based photo and video tagging feature is already defunct, but its lingering consequences are catching up with the social media giant. It will now lose $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit in Texas.

According to the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, this is the largest privacy settlement obtained by a state attorney general. Officials had accused Meta of flouting state privacy laws when it collected millions of users’ biometric data without their consent.

“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,” said Paxton in a statement.

In February 2022, Paxton sued Meta for unlawfully capturing the biometric data of millions of Texans without obtaining their informed consent as required by Texas law. Specifically, Meta’s data collection violated Texas's "Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier" Act and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

Meta’s spokesperson only said the firm was pleased to have resolved the matter – it did not admit to any wrongdoing as part of the settlement.

However, this is Meta's second-biggest settlement with federal or state lawmakers, following its $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 for consumer privacy violations.

According to Texas prosecutors, in 2011, Meta rolled out a new feature, initially called Tag Suggestions, that it claimed would improve the user experience by making it easier for users to “tag” photographs with the names of people in the photo.

The company then 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,” the statement says.

Meta’s privacy practices have been subject to intense scrutiny from regulators worldwide, especially after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. In 2023, the European Union fined Meta $1.3 billion after finding it broke the bloc’s privacy laws.

Of course, even a few billion doesn’t really hurt Meta that much. The company just said that its Q2 revenue rose 22% to $39 billion, beating market expectations.