Texas authorities have sued Meta over the use of Face Recognition, alleging that Facebook violated state privacy laws with face recognition technology that collects biographical data of people in the state. Millions of Texas without their consent, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In the lawsuit, the government also accused Facebook of downloading biometric information from photos and videos that users posted without consent to disclosing information to others and failing to destroy it within a reasonable time.

Late last year, Meta announced that it would shut down Facebook’s Face Recognition system and promised to delete the data of about one billion users it collected. Face recognition was introduced to the Facebook app in 2011, but in 2017 the company made some changes that allow users to turn off Face Recognition. Currently only about 30% of users are using this feature.

It should also be noted that the popularity of Facebook has declined significantly in the last decade with teenagers. In 2012, 94% of teens had a Facebook account, but that number has dropped to 27% in 2021, and they have switched to other social networking apps such as Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok instead. .