Meta to pay Texas $1.4B for scanning residents’ faces

Texas Judge Brad Morin on Tuesday approved a settlement agreement requiring the social media company to pay $1.4 billion to Texas over the next five years. The agreement ends a two-year legal battle between the state and Meta. Texas had alleged the company’s face scanning amounted to an unlawful biometric analysis of Texas residents. It is the biggest settlement ever between a tech company and a single state, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said on Tuesday.

The final agreement spells out that there’s no admission of wrongdoing on the part of Meta, or an admission that the state’s allegations against the company were insufficient.

What’s this about? Meta, at the time known as Facebook, rolled out a feature late in 2010 called tag suggestions. In 2011, the company secretly automatically turned on the feature for all Facebook users in Texas, Paxton’s office explained. Texas law prevented scanning residents’ biometric data without their consent. Company officials were aware of the law when they rolled out the product, Plaxton said.

By automatically turning on the feature in the state, Facebook’s platform scanned the faces of millions of Texas residents without their consent. It did so by scanning photos that their friends and family posted to Facebook. The platform’s algorithm would recognize other Facebook users in the posted photos and suggest that the posters tag the other users in the photos.

Over the years, Meta also gathered information about users’ retinas, irises, fingerprints, voices, and their face and hand geometry. The company even gathered biometric data for people who weren’t Facebook users, Paxton’s office said.

In 2022, Paxton’s office sued Meta for collecting residents’ biometric data without their consent. The lawsuit alleged that Meta unlawfully gathered biometric information billions of times, retained the information to train its burgeoning artificial intelligence software, and massively profited from its actions.

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