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Attorney General Sues Facebook for ‘Billions’ of Violations

The greatly esteemed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who found himself standing at the forefront in the battle for election integrity has taken up another desperately needed legal battle on behalf of the people of Texas. This time he is taking a stand against the Big-Tech oligarchs of Facebook, alleging that the social network has been storing untold billions of protected biometric identifiers as defined under Texas law being “a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or record of hand or face geometry” as are contained in photos and videos uploaded users as well as their friends and families who use the app.

Paxton goes on to allege in the lawsuit that is certain to be precedent-setting that in this clandestine activity Facebook has exploited the personal information of both its users and untold millions of people who never agreed to the product’s Terms of Use to grow its profits and corporate holdings to an enormous financial windfall to the tune of Trillions of dollars. Under this suit, Paxton charges that Facebook now known corporately as “Meta” has knowingly and willfully violated Texas’ Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act by capturing biometric identifiers without consent billions upon billions of times.

Texas AG Goes After Facebook For At Least $25 TRILLION

Attorney General Paxton explained the lawsuit on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo,

AG Paxton: “So in Texas we have laws related to capture and use of bioidentifiers like facial recognition and your geometry of your face and in this case they have captured, we believe, millions of Texans’ faces and they’re required by law to disclose that they’re doing it and then get your consent and then they have no ability after that to transfer to other people or other parties without your consent. They did that as well. We’re talking about 20 Million Texans on Facebook. I don’t know how many on Instagram. They’re stealing the faces of people that aren’t on Facebook that happen to have their faces posted somewhere on Facebook.”

Maria: “So what can they do with this information? People didn’t know that they were using this biometric technology?”

AG Paxton: “No. They never disclosed it. They actually implied or told us that they weren’t using facial geometry or capturing your face and the reality was, they’ve been doing it for well over a decade without our knowledge and actually misleading consumers and the state of Texas that they’re actually capturing this information.”

Maria: “So tell us what the impact is. What did Texans face as a result of this? Tell us how you can explain the damages that you’re seeking.”

AG Paxton: “Yes, so there’s specific statutory damages for deceptive trade practice up to 10,000 per violation on 25,000 per actually capturing someone’s biometric I’d fire, whether it’s face, — identifier, whether its face, fingerprints or anything. This is all personal information. It’s information you can’t change. This is your personal information. Once it’s out, once had they shared it, once they disclosed it, the genie’s out of the body, you can’t get it back. You didn’t know about it, you didn’t consent to it as required by law and it’s been used by Facebook to make more money as they share it with other people without your knowledge or your consent.”

Per Texas Bus. & Comm. Code §503.001(d) Facebook is liable for civil penalties of up to $25,000 PER INSTANCE for the BILLIONS of times these identifiers were captured, Paxton’s office writes, “Each of these illicit captures constitutes a separate violation of Tex.Bus. & Comm. Code §503.001(d)” That boils down to at least $25 Trillion assuming (vastly underestimating) at least 1 Billion instances.

The number is likely beyond reckoning and is designed to punitively force Facebook to cease capturing biometric identifiers. The fully realized number of instances in which Facebook captured just facial geometry would likely wipe out Meta’s Total Balance Sheet with their total cash estimated at $48 Billion and estimated annual gross profit of $95.28 Billion.

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