Meta to pay $1.4 billion settlement after Texas facial recognition complaint

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Facebook owner Meta has agreed to pay $1.4 billion to the state of Texas to settle claims that the company harvested millions of citizens’ biometric data without proper consent.

The settlement, to be paid over five years, is the largest ever obtained from an action brought by a single US state, said a statement from Attorney General Ken Paxton.

It also marks one of the largest penalties levied at Meta by regulators, second only to a $5 billion settlement it paid the US Federal Trade Commission in 2019 for the misuse of user data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal.