Texas Sues Meta Over Facebook's Facial-Recognition Practices

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: The Wall Street Journal.

TECH

Texas Sues Meta Over Facebook’s Facial-Recognition Practices

State says social-media giant violated privacy protections in lawsuit, seeks hundreds of billions of dollars in civil penalties

By John D. McKinnon
https://twitter.com/johndmckinnon
[e-mail]
Updated Feb. 14, 2022 1:32 pm ET

The Texas attorney general filed a suit against Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. FB -1.02% on Monday, charging that the social-media giant’s longstanding and now discontinued use of facial-recognition technology violated that state’s privacy protections for personal biometric data. .. The lawsuit, filed in state district court in Marshall by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seeks civil penalties in the hundreds of billions of dollars, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In a statement, Mr. Paxton said the company’s capture of facial geometry in photographs that users uploaded from 2010 to late last year resulted in “tens of millions of violations” of Texas law. ... “Facebook has been secretly harvesting Texans’ most personal information—photos and videos—for its own corporate profit,” Mr. Paxton said. “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.”

{snip}

The Texas lawsuit—in particular the size of the civil penalties being sought—points to the impact that increasingly widespread privacy laws could have on big tech companies’ operations. ... After Facebook’s settlement of the Illinois class-action case became known, Texas sent its own civil subpoena to the company seeking information about the facial-recognition system. Facebook announced it was ending its facial recognition system last November.

{snip}

Write to John D. McKinnon at [e-mail]

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-sues-meta-over-facebooks-facial-recognition-practices-11644854794

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Texas sued Meta over Facebook’s use of facial-recognition technology, saying it violated the state’s privacy protections for personal biometric data

Link to tweet

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Here's the article I originally posted:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/texas-sues-meta-over-facebook-171003148.html

Reuters

Texas sues Meta's Facebook over facial-recognition practices

Mon, February 14, 2022, 12:10 PM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Texas attorney general's office sued Meta's Facebook on Monday, alleging that the social media giant violated state privacy protections with facial-recognition technology that collected the biometric data of millions of Texans without their consent.

The lawsuit accuses Facebook of capturing biometric information from photos and videos that users uploaded without consent, disclosing the information to others and failing to destroy it within a reasonable time.

"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," Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement.

The lawsuit was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, which cited a person familiar with the matter as saying that the state was seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in civil penalties.

{snip}

[50 Shades Of Blue]

1. I'm glad somebody sued FB, I can't believe it was Ken Fucking Paxton!

[PatSeg]

4. Yeah, that was a surprise

[CaptainTruth]

5. FB has been fighting at least 2 major lawsuits for a while now. The media mostly ignores them.

I've been following a case in San Francisco, sometimes referred to as the Cambridge Analytica coverup suit, that has to do with FB's data harvesting & sharing.

They were getting ripped by the judge last week, the judge was pissed at them & invited the plaintiffs to file for sanctions against Facebook AND partners at the law firm representing them in the case, Gibson Dunn. Folks who've been practicing law for decades said they've never before seen a judge invite plaintiffs to file for sanctions against law firm partners from the bench. It's not going well for Facebook.

Oh wait, I just found this, from Reuters:

Sanction threat looms for Facebook and Gibson Dunn in privacy class action

[link:https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/sanction-threat-looms-facebook-gibson-dunn-privacy-class-action-2022-02-14/|]

Facebook Inc and its lawyers at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher are learning the hard way that fierce litigation tactics can provoke equally fierce blowback.

At a hearing Thursday in a class action alleging that Facebook (now Meta Platforms Inc) violated consumer privacy laws by sharing users’ data with the political consultant Cambridge Analytica and others, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of San Francisco invited plaintiffs lawyers to file a motion for sanctions against Facebook and Gibson Dunn for “stonewalling” during discovery in the four-year-old case.

The judge came in blazing hot, announcing at the very beginning of the hearing that he had developed “quite a strong preliminary view” that the company’s conduct was sanctionable – and that the Gibson Dunn lawyers who signed Facebook’s briefs are just as much to blame as their client. Chhabria said he felt so strongly on that point that if plaintiffs lawyers from Keller Rohrback and Bleichmar Fonti & Auld were not inclined to seek sanctions from Gibson Dunn, “I’m going to want to know if there’s a good reason not to.”
The judge gave Keller Rohrback and Bleichmar Fonti until Feb. 24 to file the sanction motion. He also waived his usual 15-page limit, urging plaintiffs lawyers to “take whatever space you need to articulate the misconduct and to identify the appropriate standard for imposing sanctions.”

Facebook did not respond to my query on the hearing. Gibson Dunn declined to provide a statement. The company told the judge in a Feb. 9 filing that it had not engaged in litigation misconduct. “Facebook submits that the actual record will reflect that at all times it acted in good faith and complied with every order the special master [overseeing discovery] has issued,” it said.

[CaptainTruth]

6. Reuters just reported on this as I was writing my reply, so I posted it in General Discussion

[50 Shades Of Blue]

7. Whoa! Thanks for the info, I hadn't heard about any of this!

[C Moon]

2. I was looking at this thinking, "Wow. Republicans are going at each other's throats..."

Then I noticed Ken Paxton has an upcoming election (March 1). He'll drop this lawsuit if he's reelected, I'm sure.

[getagrip_already]

3. pot calling kettle black.....

TX has a very intrusive facial and fingerprint capture and recognition system in place as part of their drivers license and state id processing procedures.

Every texan with a drivers license has their picture, and 2 thumbprints, captured and entered into a state database when they apply for or renew a license.

This is freely shared with their and federal law enforcement agencies.

But I guess its bad for someone else to do it.

[dlk]

8. Paxton sees dollar signs

Make no mistake, greed is his primary emotion. And, as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Plus, Texans are currently going to the polls for early voting. Happy to hear FB/Meta may be in the hot seat.