Meta to pay Texas $1.4B for using facial recognition without users' permission

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/07/30/texas-meta-facebook-biometric-data-settlement/

by perihelions • 2 years ago

426 216 2 years ago

tareqak• 2 years ago

Same story from the Associated Press:

Meta agrees to $1.4B settlement with Texas in privacy lawsuit over facial recognition - https://apnews.com/article/texas-attorney-general-meta-settl...

dantyti4• 2 years ago

This one seems like the better of the two, as it includes Q124 profit and revenue numbers, as well as the stock's movement

tediousgraffit15• 2 years ago

it also suggests some important details, like the fact that this was already opt-in:

At the time, more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users had opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system.

qwerty456127• 2 years ago

Do fines to big corporations even work? I tend to suspect paying them is a part of the business model - they will keep doing whatever they want to generate huge profits covering whatever fines they may have to pay.

Detrytus• 2 years ago

Well, I would expect that, in addition to paying money, this settlement also obliges Meta to stop doing whatever they were doing. And if they don't, then I would expect fine for repeated offense to be much higher, like 10x. At some point that would make ignoring law unprofitable.

camdat• 2 years ago

Meta had already ceased facial tagging over a year before the suit was filed, according to Ars.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/meta-to-pay-1-4-...

_mlbt• 2 years ago

Facebook annual revenue last year was $134.90 billion.

https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

mbreese• 2 years ago

That’s still a fine of 1% of revenue, which seems like a small percentage, but is still a sizable hit. It’s enough to make investors notice, but probably not substantially if it is a once-off event. If it isn’t a one-off event though and states/countries start fining it all over the place, then there might be more of an issue.

spywaregorilla• 2 years ago

You should cite net income when trying to make a point on this.

DoubleDerper• 2 years ago

Corporate Crime and Punishment: An Empirical Study

"Put simply, for large companies, criminal penalties may be just another cost of doing business—and quite a low cost at that."

source: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/2147/

AmVess• 2 years ago

Nope. They get passed on to the consumer, anyway.

The only way to stop this type of behavior is to throw execs in jail and take their personal assets off them.

xvector5• 2 years ago

For facial recognition in 2011? Extreme take.

ta12435• 2 years ago

Based on how long this was going on, its about $5 per user per year.

josefritzishere2• 2 years ago

I can report yes. California has been using them for years afer passing the CCPA to motivate better data privacy policy and procedure.

suprjami3• 2 years ago

So if every US state sues Meta and settles for ~1.5B that's halved the value of the company.

One more infraction with the same consequences and the company has no money left.

That sounds pretty effective to me?

echelon2• 2 years ago

Their market cap is approximately 1000x larger.

Their annual income is approximately 100x larger.

kelnos2• 2 years ago

That doesn't work, though. In practice, most states probably won't sue for this. And even if they do, Texas is one of the most populous states in the US. Presumably the per-state settlements will be proportionate to the number of people harmed. So it's not going to be 1.5B * 50 = $75B.

nickburns• 2 years ago

It's even more insulting than a fine. It's a voluntary payment in settlement that admits no liability or wrongdoing.

TiredOfLife• 2 years ago

They stopped doing facial recognition, so yes.

tediousgraffit15• 2 years ago

from the better ap-news article linked by the top comment:

The company announced in 2021 that it was shutting down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.

edm0nd• 2 years ago

Not really imo.

Getting fined for doing something illegal just really means its legal for a price.

BurningFrog2• 2 years ago

Incentives always work.

If the expected fine for X is larger than the expected profit, companies will not do X.

AnthonyMouse2• 2 years ago

That's actually kind of the problem here. The assumption built into this is that the company is doing the math. More likely the company is just so big that if even one mid-level person makes a bad call, the consequence gets propagated across a billion users. But there are so many mid-level people that it's guaranteed to happen.

Which is the same reason that "higher penalties" wouldn't work either. The problem is not that the penalties aren't sufficient to deter, the problem is that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, so even if the lawyers tell them "you must never do this" they've got thousands of independent chances to screw it up. One person who doesn't heed their training and oof.

The actual problem is that these companies are too big. Mistakes will always happen, but one mistake by one team in a huge bureaucracy shouldn't affect a population the size of a major country.

khafra• 2 years ago

Seems to be a pretty strong incentive for companies to make sure that, for anything unethical that they actually want to do, the fines will be large enough to satisfy the median voter, but small enough not to impede their business.

Empirically, large companies seem to have little problem following this incentive.

ergocoder2• 2 years ago

It works to a certain degree.

The corporation cannot repeatedly violates nor make a policy that violates the same thing over and over. The punishment would be increased exponentially...

tomwheeler• 2 years ago

Was Texas the victim? If not, why shouldn't the actual victims get the money?

dantyti4• 2 years ago

when someone litters on my lawn the administrative fine goes into the local/state budget, not my pocket.

equivocates• 2 years ago

when someone steals your tv, the restitution is paid to the victims.

selectodude• 2 years ago

When Illinois won a judgement, I received a check in the mail.

olyjohn• 2 years ago

You split the money up among the users, everybody gets a $1.50 check in the mail that costs $0.50 to mail out. Most of the checks will get tossed in the trash. Might as well just burn the money.

davidgay• 2 years ago

1.4 billion $ / 30 million people = $47/person.

Do the math before being generically cynical?

lulzury• 2 years ago

There's a similar ongoing lawsuit by Texas against Google

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/texas-fights-goo...

dantyti4• 2 years ago

I think this adware company is pure evil, but this feature seems like something a user might actually opt in to (as noted in the AP story, quite a few did).

Interesting to see that while meta at least publicly scraps the feature, a similar one on iOS Photos is not even an opt-in – you can't turn it off.

ta12435• 2 years ago

It will be trivial to get users to opt in, just bury it in the "terms of service" for whatsapp/instragram/facebook/etc and you're set.

Network effects mean you can't realistically say no.

phyrex4• 2 years ago

The difference is that the information gets processed, stored, and accessed only on your own devices with Apple, and on metas servers in the case of Facebook.

warkdarrior3• 2 years ago

How does information about my face gets processed, stored, and accessed only on your own devices? Without Apple's help?

joeamroo• 2 years ago

This going to be a slippery slope as more governments start to use fines as an alternative type of tax unique to these tech companies. I don't know how Meta/Google can react to these fines (Except the whole opt-in part, but then you have a tradeoff with usability, and people against it usually think that Meta cares about their data outside the aggregate)

Zambyte• 2 years ago

I do hope informed consent is a slippery slope. That would be stellar.

surfingdino2• 2 years ago

There is fuck all that those companies need facial recognition for. It is simply not needed and is just a massive invasion of privacy.

autoexec10• 2 years ago

They need it so that they can spy on you. It's not needed, but many companies are built on surveillance capitalism and an increasing number of companies are using that surveillance to gain a huge advantage over their customers. The more a company knows about you, the easier it is for them to take advantage of you.

There's a lot of money to be made exploiting the most intimate details of our lives. Nobody "needs" that money, but they sure don't want to leave it on the table when the government isn't going to stop them from violating our privacy and then stuffing their pockets with our cash.

qeternity• 2 years ago

This is such a ridiculous attitude. Facial recognition in my photo albums is hugely useful. It makes searching for people a breeze. Just because you don't have a need for it does not mean it is "simply not needed".

toomuchtodo3• 2 years ago

This is great news until privacy legislation catches up. Big Tech should be fearful they'll step on a mine financilly.

autoexec10• 2 years ago

Oh yeah, big tech is going to be shaking in their boots. I'm sure Meta is really crying about the 1.4 billion they lost while they're rolling around in the 134 billion in revenue they made last year. They've even got a nice easy payment plan which allows them to invest and make money on the $225 million they're going to be paying each year from 2025 to 2028.

autoexec10• 2 years ago

I don't know how Meta/Google can react to these fines

They'll react by lobbying for fines while also lobbying to limit the amount of those fines. They love the fines. Fines are something they can budget for and can let them violate the laws as long as they are willing to pay the government a fee/toll/bribe. Without fines they might be held meaningfully accountable for their crimes. The last thing they want is to face a risk of ending up in prison the way that you or I most certainly would for repeatedly ignoring the law.

phyrex4• 2 years ago

They’re also an economic moat to stop other networks from emerging. Facebook can pay those fines, $upstart can’t.

_trampeltier2• 2 years ago

Maybe, but already two years ago, if you read the fine print for ex. by buying a ticket for Cirque de Soleil you accept they can use your face on the video for ai training.

lokar2• 2 years ago

I went to a show last week. I did not buy the tickets or even see one. I did not agree to anything.

jonas21• 2 years ago

Or worse, to target specific companies that the government doesn't like for whatever reason (arguably, this is already happening in the EU).

tossandthrow• 2 years ago

How is this happening in the EU?

can16358p4• 2 years ago

That's EU's whole weaponized business model for lacking in technological development (I mean the "big tech" not tech in general though).

tomComb• 2 years ago

Now we're getting to the real point of this.

It is usually whatever company isn't friendly enough to the current government.

In Canada, it is any company that dares to compete with the telecom companies.

ta12435• 2 years ago

I don't know how Meta/Google can react to these fines

How about by not breaking the law?

freejazz4• 2 years ago

I don't know how Meta/Google can react to these fines

They could start by not breaking the law...

websap• 2 years ago

This is kinda foolish. I find this feature to be extremely useful. Governments need to do better at reducing the burden of choice for end users.

I as an end user of an app shouldn't have to go through every feature, how it is implemented and if that meets my personal privacy bar. Sensible defaults are important.

causal• 2 years ago

Governments need to do better at reducing the burden of choice for end users.

Arguably that's what Texas is doing here. Requiring permission to apply facial recognition feels like a very sensible default.

autoexec10• 2 years ago

What Texas is doing here is telling companies that they don't need your permission to steal your facial recognition data. Companies just need to consider that after several years of profiting from that facial recognition data they might one day have to pay just a tiny fraction of the money they make to the state of Texas. Cost of doing business really.

downrightmike• 2 years ago

yes, but that would require a good, better than California's protections, federal GDPR like law, and data brokers are actively lobbying against it.

jimbob45• 2 years ago

Were Facebook's lawyers asleep at the wheel for this one? It seems like they could have thrown in a clause about "pictures uploaded may be subject to facial recognition software" and no one would have batted an eye. How is it possible that they dropped the ball so hard here?

chmod775• 2 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they had that. They also could've added a clause that Facebook now owns your house, and it'd probably be roughly as interesting to a court.

The fact is that many things buried in EULAs and whatnot are not really enforceable nor constitute consent. Some things have to be agreed to more explicitly than putting them on page 50 of your fine-print.

It's especially problematic when companies start doing something you didn't directly sign up for or couldn't have expected to happen when you did. I don't think that many people who signed up for a social network in 2015 expected that their photos would later be scanned. It might surprise people even now.

staticman2• 2 years ago

Putting it in the TOS wouldn't help. If my friend takes a picture of me and posts it on Facebook, I have in no way agreed to Facebook's TOS.

CursedUrn• 2 years ago

Hopefully other states and countries sue them too. Facebook has taken massive liberties with our private data and they should be held accountable for it.

qingcharles5• 2 years ago

They already did. They settled this same kind of suit in Illinois a couple of years back and paid everyone a few hundreds dollars piece. Google too.

burningChrome• 2 years ago

This is always my frustration with class action lawsuits. The people who've been affected by the company never get anything of value. Its always the attorney's and state that started the suits that make all the money.

The worst was back in the day when Chevy used some bogus primer for their trucks. They refused to say it was their fault owners paint was coming off their trucks sans any rust. A class action was started and then over the course of several years, the government and owners finally won.

What did the owners get? Coupons for $100 off a paint job at the local Chevy dealer.

So not only did the owners not get anything to help them fix their problems, they were forwarded to a local dealership where the dealership could then take advantage of them again and charge them thousands of dollars and essentially make all the money back they were paying the attorney's and government.

nilamo• 2 years ago

Let's not pretend like that is a positive outcome. All of your personal data being irrevocably made available to persons unknown, and used for unknowable purposes for untold decades... but at least you got $100 one time.

knodi123• 2 years ago

Facebook has taken massive liberties with our private data

Gotta remember the quote from Zuckerberg during the early days, when someone asked him how he got all that private data. He said, and I quote, "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."

minklebottom• 2 years ago

I despise Facebook, but this is absurd. There's no world in which there was 1.4b of harm done to Texans.

This is no better than theft, and it will be defended exclusively by people who have never created a single thing of value in their entire lives.

awahab92• 2 years ago

[flagged]

chrischen• 2 years ago

A lot of our profile pics are actually public, and models like OpenAI's probably ingested those too.

josefritzishere2• 2 years ago

Texas passed a pretty solid CCPA-like data privacy law (TDPSA) which went into effect July 1st of 2024. That start date was announced when it was passed in JUne of 2023. Meta needs to get with the times, they're wildly out of compliance.

kazinator• 2 years ago

Governmental cash grab; the actual users whose faces were subject to recognition won't see a cent, assuming anything is actually paid. Those not in Texas will not benefit indirectly in any way.

enobrev• 2 years ago

Certainly possible. At the very least, in IL, I got a check for somewhere around $400.

delichon2• 2 years ago

This was the first lawsuit Paxton’s office argued under a 2009 state law that protects Texans’ biometric data, like fingerprints and facial scans. The law requires businesses to inform and get consent from individuals before collecting such data.

I hope it only restricts business, because I have an awkward amount of face blindness and would love to have an app that could put names to them. I wonder if the maker of such an app would be liable for my use of it in Texas.

criddell2• 2 years ago

As long as it’s opt-in, there wouldn’t be a problem.

Without that, I don’t think it could work. Does your need for an accessibility device trump my right to privacy?

warkdarrior3• 2 years ago

Where can I tell the Texas government (or Illinois, etc) that I opt-in to all facial-recognition software available to users?

tediousgraffit15• 2 years ago

this is a really important point that's not clear to me - from the [ap news article](https://apnews.com/article/texas-attorney-general-meta-settl...) linked in the top comment -

At the time, more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users had opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. Facebook introduced facial recognition more than a decade earlier but gradually made it easier to opt out of the feature as it faced scrutiny from courts and regulators.

delichon2• 2 years ago

I don't think I should need your permission to use a prosthetic to overcome a disability in performing an essential human function.

CobrastanJorji• 2 years ago

Anything you can legally opt-in to online is effectively complete freedom to companies. Nobody reads click-through agreements or terms of service. Sites will just add "and also we can collect your biometric info" to the terms, and people will keep clicking accept.

Without some very strong, EU-type rules around how you have to ask, it's just another thing lawyers will know to add to the terms.

jeffwask• 2 years ago

When do I get my 46.6 dollars or even better my 933 dollars if we only look at active Facebook users either way it still seems like a great deal price for everyone's biometrics.

the_sleaze_2• 2 years ago

Undoubtedly a great price. At times like this I'd like to see the entire extent of the profits split up among the plaintiffs.

“Wherever I'm going, I'll be there to apply the formula. I'll keep the secret intact. It's simple arithmetic. It's a story problem. If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall? You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiple it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don't initiate a recall. If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt. If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.”

singleshot_• 2 years ago

The Coase equation.

AnthonyMouse2• 2 years ago

People always quote this like the company is doing something disreputable, but that's exactly what you want them to do as long as the cost of the lawsuits accurately represent the amount of the harm.

Recalling a hundred million cars at the cost of a hundred billion dollars because there is a 0.5% chance that one person across the entire hundred million could die is the wrong choice. Otherwise all products would have to be recalled continuously, because nothing is perfectly safe. Example: Many cars have been sold without lane departure warning systems, even though that could cause some people to die. Should they all be recalled?

The equation above is how you calculate the cutoff for whether to do the recall. What would you propose that they do instead?

al_borland• 2 years ago

These penalties need to be much higher if we're going to hope for any change in behavior.

Maybe every state should sue, so it would be $70B. Of course that still doesn't make a dent when Meta's market cap is $1.174 T. It's a rounding error.

conductr• 2 years ago

The penalty would be greater if they continued violating. First time penalties should probably work that way. However, there needs to be a 3 strike rule or something similar, where penalties of any type by the same entity grow exponentially and ultimately you get banned from operating. Status quo is a series of slaps on the wrists for differing infractions. It just trains them to hide their wrongdoing better.

swamp40• 2 years ago

Is this why Illinois made it illegal too? For a nice big payout?

dmitrygr• 2 years ago

Or maybe because the public wants this? I sure as hell want facial recognition made more difficult. I can’t change my face so I would prefer it not be used as a key in any database

immibis3• 2 years ago

There's a zero to negative correlation between the amount the voting public wants a bill to pass, and the likelihood that it passes.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

jmakov• 2 years ago

This is a trend not only among banks but more and more among big tech - just include the (future) fine into your product price, then settle (if they investigate at all). No harm, nobody goes to prison, everybody happy.

jldugger• 2 years ago

Also feels like a trend among states to end-run the commerce clause. Want to tax imports despite the Constitution? Just pass regulations that only affect out of state industries and fine them for non-compliance.

kelnos2• 2 years ago

I think that's fair, given that the commerce clause is interpreted so ridiculously broadly that the 10th amendment might as well not exist.

andsoitis• 2 years ago

This pattern is not exclusive to “big companies”.

We all know individuals who explicitly do the same w.r.t. speeding on the highway, driving in the HOV lanes, etc.

So it seems to me that there’s a fundamental human trait (“what can I get away with” ??) that warrants thinking about as well.

dietr1ch• 2 years ago

So it seems to me that there’s a fundamental human trait (“what can I get away with” ??) that warrants thinking about as well.

Idk, I suspect many "crimes" like jaywalking and speeding are more around, this rule errs too hard on safety, but I know I can do this safely, and if it's not safe enough I'll get to pay the consequences (fines, accidents, dying). That's nothing like violating the privacy of other people for profit and no real penalty (actual jailtime for those involved, not just a --fine-- tax on the profits)

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 2 years ago

speeding on the highway, driving in the HOV lanes

This seems like it's apples to oranges. The people choosing to do these things aren't doing so because they consider it to be a cost of business, expecting that they'll generate more in revenue, but because they think the likelihood of being caught and the gravity of the offense are relatively low. This practice of disregarding regulations because the fines can be factored as a cost is fairly well confined to large corporations.

(I guess someone being paid per mile driven from advertising decals on their car would get a business benefit from the speeding; they may even factor in the probability of being caught with the amount of the fine to determine their speeding decisions. That's nobody I know, though.)

CydeWeys2• 2 years ago

$1.4B is serious money though. You can't be paying that out left and right, and there's no way Meta made more than $1.4B on doing facial analysis of photos uploaded by Texans. This was an actual loss by them, and thus an error.

whythre• 2 years ago

It also seems to leave the door open to similar outcomes in other jurisdictions, compounding the potential loss.

glaucon• 2 years ago

1.5 days revenue which they have negotiated to pay over the course of five years.

neongodzilla• 2 years ago

No harm? What about the people who lost their privacy without consent? That doesn't get repaired.

hamasho2• 2 years ago

I think GP meant no harm for those corporations.

renonce• 2 years ago

The settlement, announced Tuesday, does not act as an admission of guilt and Meta maintains no wrongdoing.
In 2011, Meta introduced a feature known as Tag Suggestions to make it easier for users to tag people in their photos. According to Paxton’s office, the feature was turned on by default and ran facial recognition on users’ photos, automatically capturing data protected by the 2009 law. That system was discontinued in 2021, with Meta saying it deleted over 1 billion people’s individual facial recognition data.
The 2022 lawsuit
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

Each statement makes it increasingly harder to view it as a fine than a tax. An offence that lasted 11 years and got prosecuted a year after it ended can be explained in no other way than being an excuse dug out of the ground to make a ransom

eftychis2• 2 years ago

Equitable and more specifically injunctive relief is the way out of this abuse of "crime is the cost of doing business" mentality. (That a lot of us raise here.)

What could that mean: Meta or whichever company breaks the law, loses ownership and rights to anything that is the result of the crime.

If it's a model, Meta can not use that or any other version of the model that utilized data illegally acquired. And that model becomes property of the victims.

TechDebtDevin• 2 years ago

That would be the equivalent of confiscating a fleet or trucks from a trucking company whenever a driver broke a law. A little extreme and will never happen. China doesn't even operate like this.

eftychis2• 2 years ago

Not unheard of for some crimes, eg drugs or money laundering.

Securities fraud also essentially offers that: all money made out of the fraud and gains on that belong to the victims.

California's Unfair Competition framework also dictates essentially payment of the proceeds of the "unlawful activity" and taking actions to undo it.

Again this is already an existing relief for certain crimes or civil torts committed by individuals.

We just have not legislated to apply it to you know the other "persons," the companies.

xvector5• 2 years ago

This would just create a perverse incentive for the government to confiscate everything it can. Then you would see laws being crafted that are increasingly ambiguous and difficult to follow in order to enable greater confiscation of goods.

Asset forfeiture isn't something we should be cheering on.

farceSpherule• 2 years ago

The fine is nothing. Not even 10% of their net profits for 2023.

galangalalgol• 2 years ago

If every state sues and gets almost %10 that could be an issue...

Dowwie• 2 years ago

Do the users get any of that money?

29athrowaway3• 2 years ago

Will they delete the information? Or they purchased Texan facial data for 1.4b?

tediousgraffit15• 2 years ago

the ap news article linked by the top comment indicates that they deleted 'faceprints':

The company announced in 2021 that it was shutting down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people...

29athrowaway3• 2 years ago

What does deletion mean anyways? some bullshit soft deletion without any auditing that will enable them to keep using the data?

tediousgraffit15• 2 years ago

The attorney general’s office did not say whether the money from the settlement would go into the state’s general fund or if it would be distributed in some other way.

so where's that money going to wind up?

warkdarrior3• 2 years ago

The money goes to the AG's re-election campaign.

Noumenon72• 2 years ago

Huh, I wondered why this feature stopped being available. It would be even more useful now that you could use AI to say "find me all photos of George riding his bike" or "find all pictures of me with Dave".

hamasho2• 2 years ago

Probably that data was used to train AI models too. I hope we establish a legal framework that prevents training models without proper permission, and the companies that have already trained their models will get fined and those models will be banned from commercial use.

I enjoy the rapid progress of LLMs. ChatGPT and Claude are already a critical part of my daily work. But I don't like the current situation where VCs and start-ups use unpermitted data to train the models, don't respect content creators, and take advantage of the lack of regulations.

sensanaty• 2 years ago

There really needs to be a 3-strike rule type of thing with fines like these. It's ridiculous to me that they can continue to violate people's privacy without their consent, get fined a percentage of a percentage of the money they actually made on the practice, and that's the end of it.

These fines should be exponential in nature, and aggressively so. The 4th-in-a-row fine of this nature should basically take everything they earned in the whole year. Let's see how quick and efficient they suddenly become once there's actual consequences.

That, or Zucc and his cronies should be getting jailed. I'm fine with either option, or preferably both.

xkcd19632• 2 years ago

Yes. And facebook is not too big to fail. There are thousands of alternatives to Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram. And the few employees they have easily find another job.

mattfrommars• 2 years ago

Anyone know how much money the legal firm gets from this? Their cut should be substantial since we are talking $1.4 billon dollars here.

lern_too_spel• 2 years ago

It's the AG's office filing the suit, not a class action.

hobo_in_library• 2 years ago

So who gets the money?

rideontime• 2 years ago

Now do Clearview AI.

dreamcompiler• 2 years ago

Ken Paxton is still under federal investigation for various crimes, but I suppose even criminals do the right thing sometimes.

jrochkind1• 2 years ago

Consumer Reports, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, commended Paxton for the lawsuit but noted it was an outliner.

outlier, presumably. i remember when newspapers had good copy editing.

bankcust08385• 2 years ago

Maybe the state can direct some funds to TxDOT to properly mark hazards on their easements near roadways and properties to avoid my mom crashing her car into a hidden, unguarded, unmarked culvert.

blitzar• 2 years ago

It's a write-off for them. They just write it off. All these big companies just write everything.

jameson• 2 years ago

Meta introduced a feature known as Tag Suggestions to make it easier for users to tag people in their photos. According to Paxton’s office, the feature was turned on by default and ran facial recognition on users’ photos, automatically capturing data protected by the 2009 law.

Meta should also be forbidden from using any features derived from this data, or open source any trained model from the data. 1.4B settlement is too small compared to the long term gains of a company

ergocoder2• 2 years ago

I'm surprised they haven't checked that the data isn't used elsewhere...

wwilim• 2 years ago

Suing big tech for ethical issues seems to be a reliable source of income for governments these days

xvector5• 2 years ago

Write enough laws and a company is bound to break one of them at some point. Simple probability. Easy source of income for an indefinite period.

Lio2• 2 years ago

If your business is dedicated to removing people’s legal right to privacy then you are probably going to break the law at some point.

Why not just act ethically in the first place?

preciousoo• 2 years ago

oh brotherrr

Meta to pay Texas $1.4B for using facial recognition without users' permission

Related Stories