In a landmark victory for state rights and consumer protection, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured a monumental $1.4 billion settlement with Meta, the tech giant headed by Mark Zuckerberg.
This from thepatriotjournal.com.
Conservatives are outraged over claims that big tech companies are censoring users. Free speech has long been under attack online. But some of these social networks go even further to take advantage of their users.
In 2011, Facebook rolled out a feature that scans users’ pictures to compile biometric data for facial recognition.
While this was supposed to be an opt-in feature, one state attorney general claims Facebook activated it without users’ consent.
Well, that ran afoul of Texas law. Attorney General Ken Paxton decided to take Meta to court over it. After a two-year battle, Paxton announced the court’s verdict. And nobody saw this coming.
From Breitbart:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) announced he has won a $1.4 billion settlement from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta over privacy-related concerns involving Facebook capturing Texan users’ facial and biometric data without their knowledge or consent.
Paxton, from his press release:
This settlement is the largest ever obtained from an action brought by a single State and the largest privacy settlement an Attorney General has ever obtained.
Unbeknownst to most Texans, for more than a decade Meta ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photographs uploaded to Facebook, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted.
This settlement is not just a win for Texas but a signal to big tech companies everywhere that states will not hesitate to hold them accountable for their actions.
Texas AG Paxton:
Facebook guilty of violating Texans’ privacy rights.
Paxton stated that the company’s policies violated the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act (CUBI) and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The attorney general made the case that Facebook had been gathering facial data on Texans without their consent for a decade. And, as you might imagine, the setting to turn it off is buried in endless settings pages on Facebook.
Despite claiming users could opt out
of this feature, it was turned on automatically.
There was a time when lawsuits against big social networks never succeeded. These companies were able to hide behind the First Amendment and other legal loopholes that shielded them from ramifications. But these social networks are not simply websites for posting memes; they are compiling the data of billions of people for use by these companies.
But as websites like Google, YouTube, and Facebook
became more powerful, courts started to grow worried.
Certainly, courts are aware social networks have tremendous power and—like all corporations and government agencies—need to be held in check.
For Facebook to be gathering data on users without their consent, judges across America might want to hold them accountable.
What this $1.4 billion settlement will be used for is unknown at this time. Depending on the conditions of the ruling, it could be used to secure further protections for Texas residents.
