Texas sues Meta over Facebook facial recognition

After witnessing a historic wipeout a few days back, Meta has found itself in another trouble. This time however it is in some serious legal trouble. The social media giant was charged with violation of privacy due to its discontinued facial recognition technology by the Attorney Journal of Texas. Meta Incorporation on the other hand has denied the charges and said that these are just baseless allegations. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed the lawsuit in state district court in Marshall and seeks civil penalties in the hundreds of billions of dollars. In his statement released, Attorney Journal said: “Facebook has been secretly harvesting Texans’ most personal information—photos and videos—for its own corporate profit. Texas law has prohibited such harvesting without informed consent for over 20 years. While ordinary Texans have been using Facebook to innocently share photos of loved ones with friends and family, we now know that Facebook has been brazenly ignoring Texas law for the last decade”. Reacting to this Meta defended itself by claiming that the charges pressed against the company are without merit and they will defend themseleves vigorously. Meta said, users were always notified and they were asked for their consent before using its facial recognition services. Earlier in the year, 2015 Facebook faced similar charges of breach of privacy, with the same facial recognition technology in the State of Illinois which was settled in the year 2020 for $650 million.