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Paxton's win against Meta is a win for privacy. It's only a first step.
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Houston Chronicle
Posted: August 20th, 2024
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/...
If you appeared in a photo on Facebook any time between 2011 and 2021, it is likely your biometric information was fed into DeepFace — the company’s controversial deep-learning facial recognition system that tracked the face scan data of at least a billion users. That's where Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton comes in. His office secured a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta over its alleged violation of a Texas law that bars the capture of biometric data without consent. Meta is on the hook to pay $275 million within the next 30 days and the rest over the next four years. Why did Paxton wait until 2022 — a year after Meta announced it would suspend its facial recognition technology and delete its database — to go up against the tech giant? If our AG truly prioritized privacy, he'd focus on the lesser-known companies that law enforcement agencies here in Texas are paying to scour and store our biometric data. In 2017, [Clearview AI] launched a facial recognition app that ... could identify strangers from a photo by searching a database of faces scraped without consent from social media. In 2020, news broke that at least 600 law enforcement agencies were tapping into a database of 3 billion facial images. Clearview was hit with lawsuit after lawsuit. That same year, the company was hacked and its entire client list — which included the Department of Justice, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Interpol, retailers and hundreds of police departments — was leaked.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and Big Tech from reliable major media sources.
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