It seems that Meta loves spending time in courtrooms defending Facebook. Unfortunately, the company keeps getting in trouble thanks to its data collecting practices and privacy issues. The latest issue involves the Texas attorney general’s office, which recently sued Meta’s Facebook, claiming that the social media platform violated state privacy protection by collecting facial recognition data of millions of Texans without their approval.

Meta is once again being accused o taking data from Facebook users, as the social media giant has allegedly been capturing information from photos and videos uploaded by users. Of course, this also means that Facebook didn’t ask its users’ authorization for these actions, hence the new lawsuit.

Attorney General Ken Paxton said: “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.”

According to information from The Wall Street Journal, the state of Texas is seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in civil penalties. However, a Meta spokesperson said that: “These claims are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”

Back in November, Meta said in a blog post that it was shutting down a facial recognition system and that it would delete information on more than one billion users. The reason behind this decision is that the company had concerns about the use of this technology. However, it seems that Meta conveniently forgot to destroy the data within a reasonable time.

We have to remember that Meta already agreed to pay $650 million back in 2020 to solve an Illinois state lawsuit that also had to do with its data-collecting practices and privacy concerns.

The new lawsuit expresses that “the scope of Facebook’s misconduct is staggering” and that “Facebook repeatedly captured Texans’ biometric identifiers without consent, not hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times -- but billions of times.”

Earlier this month, we saw that Meta was also threatening to shut down Facebook and Instagram in Europe since it has been unable to comply with new data sharing agreements established by Europe. Meta claims that its processing of data across continents is crucial for ad targeting and its operational business, and this won’t be possible if users’ data has to be kept and processed on Europe’s servers only. For now, we can only wait to see what’s going to be Meta’s next step in these situations.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Via: Reuters