Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday filed a lawsuit against Meta over Facebook's facial recognition practices, his office said. The Wall Street Journal reported on the move, noting the civil penalties in question are hundreds of billions of dollars. The lawsuit claims that company practices involving its discontinued use of facial recognition technology violate state protections regarding biometric data.

An accompanying press release announcing the lawsuit claims Facebook stores millions of customers' biometric identifiers in photographs and videos that customers upload to the social network. Attorney General Paxton says Facebook exploited the personal information of its users "to grow its empire and reap historic windfall profits.".

Facebook will no longer take advantage of people and their children with the intent to turn a profit at the expense of one's safety and well-being," Paxton said in a statement. "This is yet another example of Big Tech's deceitful business practices and it must stop. I will continue to fight for Texans' privacy and security.".

These claims are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously," a Meta spokesperson responded to TechCrunch in an email.

That is, it falsely concealed the character of its practice and deceived Texans who used the app into believing that Facebook was not collecting their biometric identifiers from photographs and videos. It further alleges, without stating more about them, that users were never informed that Facebook was sharing users' personal information with other third parties who exploited it further.

"Facebook often failed to destroy collected biometric identifiers within a reasonable time, exposing Texans to ever-increasing risks to their well-being, safety and security," the lawsuit reads. "Facebook knowingly captured biometric information for its own commercial benefit, to train and improve its facial recognition technology, and thereby create a powerful artificial intelligence apparatus that reaches all corners of the world and ensnares even those who have intentionally avoided using Facebook services."

Meta said in November 2021 that it would shut down its Face Recognition system across Facebook and would no longer automatically identify opted-in users in photos and videos. It would, as part of this shutdown, also delete over a billion individual facial recognition templates. But officials in Texas asked Meta to preserve the data as part of an investigation, which probably delayed the full closure of the system.

Meta has been sued over its use of facial recognition several times before. For instance, last March, a court ordered Facebook to pay $650 million for violating an Illinois law meant to protect the state's residents from surveillance privacy practices. That law, known as the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), is one of the most stringent state measures that have sent tech companies off-kilter lately. The lawsuit against Facebook dates back to 2015 after accusing Facebook of violating state law by making facial recognition--the standard practice used by the company to automatically recognize people in photos--without consent.

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After the ruling,1.6 million Illinois residents received at least $345 from the final settlement ruling in California federal court. The final number was $100 million more than the $550 million Facebook proposed in 2020, which a judge deemed inadequate. Facebook disabled the automatic facial recognition tagging features in 2019 and made them opt-in instead, addressing some of the privacy criticisms echoed by the Illinois class-action suit.

A $650 million settlement would have been more than enough to significantly cause a dent on any normal company, but Facebook brushed it off as it did with the FTC's record-setting $5 billion penalty in 2019 following its probe into the social media giant's privacy issues.

Texas new lawsuit is expected to affect the operations of Meta and other big technology companies due to the broadly applied privacy laws. In recent years, a variety of lawsuits have targeted Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, with accusations that the three firms engaged in law-breaking by training their facial recognition systems on people's faces without prior consent.
State of Texas v. Meta Platforms Inc. by TechCrunch on Scribd