Austin, Texas — The Texas Office of the Attorney General announced today that it reached a settlement with Meta over allegations that the company collected and used the personal biometric identifiers of millions of Texas residents without obtaining appropriate consent required by the law. The company is required to pay $1.4 billion to Texas, the largest privacy settlement ever achieved by a state.
“We commend the Texas AG for holding Meta accountable for its brazenly deceptive collection and misuse of consumers’ biometric data,” said Matt Schwartz, policy analyst at Consumer Reports. “This critical settlement will reinforce that companies should never secretly collect and share consumers’ biometric data and that they stand to face serious repercussions if they do. We appreciate that the AG considered Meta’s lax approach to consent a violation of Texas’ consumer protection statute, even outside of their clear violations of Texas’ biometrics law. As companies compete to build large-scale AI models, the scramble for consumer data threatens to become a race to the bottom, so enforcement agencies must keep a watchful eye for unfair data collection practices.”
Unfortunately, this enforcement action is an outlier, as state enforcement authorities have brought too few cases in recent years despite evidence of prevalent violations in the marketplace. Collectively, state privacy enforcement bodies have undertaken just three enforcement actions under the six comprehensive privacy laws that have gone into effect since the California Consumer Privacy Act in 2018.
Consumer Reports calls on the Texas AG to apply this same level of rigor to its enforcement capabilities under Texas’ new comprehensive privacy law, which CR pushed to strengthen, that became effective earlier this month.
Contact: Cyrus Rassool, cyrus.rassool@consumer.org