Meta to pay USD 1.4 bln to settle facial recognition data lawsuit

Filed in 2022, the lawsuit was the first significant case under Texas' 2009 biometric privacy law, as noted by law firms monitoring the litigation. This law allows for damages of up to USD 25,000 per violation. The US state, Texas alleged that Facebook collected biometric information billions of times from photos and videos uploaded by users through a free, now-discontinued feature called Tag Suggestions. 

A spokesperson for Meta said the company is pleased to resolve the matter and mentioned the company's anticipation of exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including potentially developing data centers. Despite the settlement, Meta has denied any wrongdoing. 

A Texas Attorney General stated that the settlement demonstrates the state's commitment to challenging major technology companies and holding them accountable for legal violations and breaches of Texans' privacy rights. 

In July 2024, Data protection authority in Brazil (ANPD) blocked Meta from training its AI models on Brazilian personal data, citing the risks of serious damage and difficulty to users. The decision followed an update to Meta’s privacy policy in which the social media granted itself permission to use public Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram data from Brazil including posts, images, and captions for AI training. 

After a report by Human Rights Watch revealed that LAION-5B, a large image-caption datasets used for training AI models, includes personal, identifiable photos of children in Brazil, exposing them to the risk of deepfakes and other forms of exploitation. Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority stated that the policy poses an imminent risk of serious and difficult-to-repair damage to the fundamental rights of users in Brazil.