by Nihal Krishan at Washington Examiner
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton reportedly sued Facebook on Monday for violating the state’s privacy protections for personal biometric data through facial recognition technology it used until recently.
Paxton filed the suit in a state district court in Marshall and sought civil penalties in the hundreds of billions of dollars because of the company’s history of recording facial geometry in photographs of users uploaded from 2010 to last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“Facebook has been secretly harvesting Texans’ most personal information — photos and videos — for its own corporate profit,” Paxton said in a statement. “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.”
The unusually large size of civil penalties being sought by Texas is indicative of a growing trend of punishing the Big Tech companies for violating state privacy laws…
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