Storms keep coming: Silently recording the faces of millions of users for more than a decade, Facebook is being sued for hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation.

According to CNN, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against Meta (Facebook’s parent company) alleging that this social network violated user privacy. Mr. Paxton said that Facebook illegally collected facial recognition data of tens of millions of people living in the state over the course of a decade. The fine for Meta can accordingly reach hundreds of billions of dollars.

In the petition, Mr. Ken Paxton asserts that Meta recorded users’ faces from 2010 to the end of 2021 without permission.

” Facebook has been secretly exploiting users’ confidential information including their photos and videos. Meanwhile, the state of Texas has banned unauthorized use of personal information for the past 20 years. People here shared so many pictures of herself, family, and friends without even knowing it ,” Attorney General Paxton said.

Meta may have to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for violating user privacy.

Under current Texas law, each user data breach will be subject to a $25,000 fine. Thus, considering that 20 million Texans have used the social network Facebook in 2021, the amount of compensation Meta has to pay could reach hundreds of billions of dollars.

From 2010 to June 2011, Facebook secretly forced millions of Texans to join facial recognition without their permission. As a result, over the next 10 years, these people showed up. in the media uploaded to Facebook. There is no doubt that Facebook recorded their faces ,” the complaint said.

In fact, this social network in November 2021 announced it would stop providing its identification feature, just months after being sued by class in Illinois for a user data breach. At the time, Facebook said it would delete all data it collected from at least 600 million users.

Therefore, in response to the allegations of the state of Texas, the Meta side asserted that they were baseless and said they would appeal to the end. “The above statement is completely void and we will defend ourselves to the end ,” a Meta representative said.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the move by the state of Texas marks a major turning point in authorities’ years-long investigation into Meta’s facial-recognition software and underscores the growing pressure. in the matter of information security of Big Tech.

Previously, a class-action lawsuit in Illinois also caused Facebook to pay $ 650 million after allegedly violating privacy regulations in the face recognition feature. At that time, Facebook’s lawyers only protested that the state of Illinois did not mention the application of this law in the use of user identification information.

In the recent lawsuit, in addition to asking Facebook to compensate for the violations, the representative of the state of Texas affirmed that it will continue to prevent Meta’s unauthorized use of data in the future. This means that the state is still suspicious of Facebook’s collection of biometric information.

” Facebook announced the discontinuation of facial recognition on the platform in November 2021. However, the group failed to live up to this commitment with its sub-apps such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Reality Labs and even is the upcoming metaverse ,” the lawsuit states.

Before that, Facebook’s facial recognition technology caused a lot of controversy. Most believe that this technology does not overcome some weaknesses, such as the ability to identify people of color.

Via: CNN, WSJ