Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be deposed in an ongoing lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, which accuses Meta of “capturing and using the biometric data of millions of Texans without properly obtaining their informed consent to do so”.
The suit was filed in 2022 and zeroes in on Meta allegedly ‘secretly harvesting’ facial recognition without user’s permission, which is a violation of state law.
Zuckerberg has been ordered by a Texas state appeals court to testify in the case, upholding a lower court’s decision.
Meta had attempted to avoid Zuckerberg having to be deposed but the Texas court has said he must because, according to the filing, he has “unique personal knowledge of discoverable information relevant to its claims”.
According to the Texas lawsuit, Meta allegedly gathered biometric data from customer’s uploading videos and photos, but “failed to destroy collected identifiers within a reasonable time.”
The Texas court will be pursuing hundreds of billions of dollars in civil penalties and fines can max out at $25,000 for each breach of applicable state laws.
Meta says the lawsuit is “without merit.”
The Texas Attorney General, Ken Patton, said to the contrary, Meta has been attempting to “take advantage of people and their children with the intent to turn a profit at the expense of one’s safety and well-being.”
Meta had said it would close down its facial recognition program and went on to delete related data for roughly a billion users back In November 2021.
