Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Meta on Monday, alleging the Facebook parent illegally collected biometric data on users without their consent.
The suit makes claims similar to those made in a class action case Facebook settled for $650 million last year. That case alleged Facebook violated Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act by storing data about people’s faces without their consent for its photo-tag suggestion tool.
Facebook announced in November it would shut down its facial-recognition system that identified faces in photos and suggested that users tag them. The company said it would delete individual facial-recognition templates for more than 1 billion people.
Texas’ lawsuit claims Facebook violated state law by failing to gain users’ informed consent to collect their biometric data, as well as failing to destroy that data in a reasonable period of time. The suit claims Facebook violated rights of Texans who did not even use the social media giant’s services, because the company allegedly collected facial identifiers on photos uploaded to its site whether those pictured were Facebook users or not.
In the suit, Texas alleged Facebook violated the law by capturing facial-recognition data without consent billions of times.
The state can enforce a civil penalty of up to $25,000 per violation of Texas’ Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act for each unlawful collection of a biometric identifier, disclosure of that data to a third-party and failure to destroy the data in a timely manner, according to the suit.
The state also alleges Facebook violated the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act by misleading consumers and asked for an additional $10,000 civil penalty for each violation of that law.
Paxton said at a press conference Monday that the total penalties could tally in the billions of dollars.
Texas claims that while Facebook marketed its tag-suggestion tool, users did not fully realize that by accepting or rejecting tags, they were helping to train the company’s artificial intelligence system to continue to recognize those faces.
The plaintiffs charge that Facebook’s violations left Texans at risk of having their personal information stolen.
“Unlike other identifiers, such as Social Security numbers, which can be changed when stolen or misappropriated, biometric identifiers are permanent,” the suit said. “Once a biometric identifier is captured, a bad actor can access and exploit the identifier for the rest of the victim’s life.”
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Texas lawsuit.
