Meta will pay a record $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit with Texas, which accused the Facebook giant of breaking privacy laws by performing facial recognition on people's photos without their consent.

The US state sued Meta [PDF] in 2022, and at the time it was the first lawsuit - and now the first settlement - brought against an organization under Texas's 2009 Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier (CUBI) Act.

In a statement announcing the deal, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton put other tech firms on notice that "any abuse of Texans' sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law."

"After vigorously pursuing justice for our citizens whose privacy rights were violated by Meta's use of facial recognition software, I'm proud to announce that we have reached the largest settlement ever obtained from an action brought by a single state," Paxton said today.

As is typical in these, and per the settlement agreement [PDF] with Texas, Meta does not admit any wrongdoing.

"We are pleased to resolve this matter, and look forward to exploring future opportunities to deepen our business investments in Texas, including potentially developing data centers," a Meta spokesperson told The Register.

The lawsuit dates back to Facebook's 2011 photo tagging feature, which performed automated facial recognition on people present in uploaded photos. The system would suggest to users who was in their pictures based on their faces, and offer to link through to those friends' profiles from the images.

Meta had not first informed, and obtained clear consent from, the people in the photos before capturing their biometric identifiers to perform the recognition for commercial purposes, prosecutors in Texas claimed. And this, the state said, caused the social media giant to violate CUBI, which forbids companies from using Texans' biometrics in such a way without due permission.

Under the settlement, Meta will pay the state $1.4 billion over five years.

This latest lawsuit follows an earlier $390 million settlement that Texas and 39 other states obtained from Google in 2022 over similar biometric privacy concerns. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/30/meta_texas_settlement/