Texas AG sues Facebook for allegedly collecting facial-recognition data without consent

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.