Meta settled a billion-dollar lawsuit over the use of facial recognition technology to power the “tag suggestion” feature, which was discontinued in 2021.
In 2022 Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Facebook parent company, claiming it had used personal biometric data without permission. The primary allegation from the case focused on Meta’s use of facial recognition software on photos uploaded to Facebook without the user’s consent. The $1.4B settlement is considered the largest settlement ever obtained by a single state, and the largest settlement related to privacy that a state attorney general has ever secured. The settlement will be paid over five years. Meta has close to a month to pay the first amount of $500 million with subsequent installments of $225 million each to be paid annually through 2028.
The suit hinged on a 2009 state law that protects Texans’ biometric data, like fingerprints and facial scans. This 2009 code provision requires businesses to inform and get consent from individuals before collecting biometric data. This judgement comes while another case involving 800 school systems suing a collection of social media companies is pending. This class action suit includes almost half of Maryland’s school systems.
The plaintiffs are arguing these platforms “intentionally designed their platforms to target children without providing adequate warnings to users and parents about the potential dangers of social media leading to increased rates of eating disorders, depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts.” This case is still in the discovery phase while a number of other lawsuits continue to consider whether lawmakers can regulate social media companies.
A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Moody v. NetChoice; NetChoice v. Paxton passed on the opportunity to make a clear statement about what types of standards and regulations are permissible for governments to establish. With a number of lower court cases each containing decidedly divergent concerns and fact patterns, the court sent the decision back to the states. This ruling concerns all types of regulation, not only how the speech of a user is regulated by the platform but also how content is organized by algorithms for children and other vulnerable users.
