Texas sues Meta over facial recognition — Analysis
The attorney general’s office in the southern US state claims that Facebook violated users’ privacy rights
A lawsuit was filed against Facebook, which changed its company name to Meta last year, on Monday by the Texas attorney general’s office, alleging the social media corporation violated state privacy rights with facial recognition technology.
According to the Wall Street Journal the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit at Marshall’s state district court, seeking civic damages of hundreds of billions.
Paxton, in a statement regarding the suit, accused Paxton of accusing the social media giant. “harvesting Texans’ most personal information”It used facial recognition software from 2010 to last year. “corporate profit.” The software would scan and store facial recognition data from users’ photographs.
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“Texas law has prohibited such harvesting without informed consent for over 20 years. While ordinary Texans have been using Facebook to innocently share photos of loved ones with friends and family, we now know that Facebook has been brazenly ignoring Texas law for the last decade,”Paxton stated.
Facebook’s facial recognition software has drawn legal challenges in the past, with the social media platform settling a 2015 lawsuit in Illinois for a reported $650 million. The lawsuit was similar to Texas’ complaint, as it argued Facebook’s software violated the state’s biometric privacy law, which prohibits people’s biometric data from being stored without consent. Last November, the software was removed.
In a blog post by Jerome Pesenti, the company’s vice president of artificial intelligence, it was suggested that there are not yet “clear rules”How to use such software.
“We need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules,” Pesenti wrote.
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