AUSTIN, Tex. — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Facebook owner, Meta.

Paxton alleges that Meta illegally collected users’ biometric data, including facial recognition technology, without their consent.

The lawsuit goes on to accuse Meta of sending the information to others for profit.

According to the suit, Facebook violated a Texas law that requires people to get permission before capturing a person’s biometric information.

The suit also alleges that Facebook failed to destroy the data in a reasonable amount of time, which violates state law.

The Attorney General’s Office says Facebook violated state law billions of times.

Meta is also accused of violating Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act because it reportedly misled users.

There is a $25,000 penalty for each unlawful capturing of a biometric identifier.

The lawsuit asks for an additional $10,000 civil penalty for each violation.

Paxton estimates that the penalties could add up to billions of dollars.

This lawsuit out of Texas is similar to another suit out of Illinois in 2021, where Facebook was accused of using its Tag Suggestions tool to store users’ biometric data without their consent.

The suit ended with a class action privacy settlement.

Facebook was ordered to pay $650 million.

Meta has not commented on the recent lawsuit in Texas.

MENLO PARK, Calif. —

Facebook said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.

Related video above: Rite Aid Nixes Facial Recognition Software in 2020 Amid Accusations of Racial Bias.

"This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history," Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook’s new parent company, Meta, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. "Its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates."

He said the company was trying to weigh the positive use cases for the technology "against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules."

Facebook’s about-face follows a busy few weeks. On Thursday it announced its new name Meta for Facebook the company, but not the social network. The change, it said, will help it focus on building technology for what it envisions as the next iteration of the internet — the "metaverse."

The company is also facing perhaps its biggest public relations crisis to date after leaked documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen showed that it has known about the harms its products cause and often did little or nothing to mitigate them.

More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. That’s about 640 million people. But Facebook has recently begun scaling back its use of facial recognition after introducing it more than a decade ago.

The company in 2019 ended its practice of using face recognition software to identify users’ friends in uploaded photos and automatically suggesting they "tag" them. Facebook was also sued in Illinois over the tag suggestion feature.

The decision "is a good example of trying to make product decisions that are good for the user and the company," said Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame. She added that the move also demonstrates the power of regulatory pressure, since the face recognition system has been the subject of harsh criticism for over a decade.

Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook's parent company, appears to be looking at new forms of identifying people. Pesenti said Tuesday's announcement involves a "company-wide move away from this kind of broad identification, and toward narrower forms of personal authentication."

"Facial recognition can be particularly valuable when the technology operates privately on a person’s own devices," he wrote. "This method of on-device facial recognition, requiring no communication of face data with an external server, is most commonly deployed today in the systems used to unlock smartphones."

Researchers and privacy activists have spent years raising questions about the tech industry's use of face-scanning software, citing studies that found it worked unevenly across boundaries of race, gender or age. One concern has been that the technology can incorrectly identify people with darker skin.

Another problem with face recognition is that in order to use it, companies have had to create unique faceprints of huge numbers of people – often without their consent and in ways that can be used to fuel systems that track people, said Nathan Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has fought Facebook and other companies over their use of the technology.

"This is a tremendously significant recognition that this technology is inherently dangerous," he said.

Concerns also have grown because of increasing awareness of the Chinese government’s extensive video surveillance system, especially as it’s been employed in a region home to one of China’s largely Muslim ethnic minority populations.

At least seven states and nearly two dozen cities have limited government use of the technology amid fears over civil rights violations, racial bias and invasion of privacy. Debate over additional bans, limits and reporting requirements has been underway in about 20 state capitals this legislative session, according to data compiled by the Electronic Privacy Information Center in May of this year.

Meta’s newly wary approach to facial recognition follows decisions by other U.S. tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and IBM last year to end or pause their sales of facial recognition software to police, citing concerns about false identifications and amid a broader U.S. reckoning over policing and racial injustice.

President Joe Biden’s science and technology office in October launched a fact-finding mission to look at facial recognition and other biometric tools used to identify people or assess their emotional or mental states and character.

European regulators and lawmakers have also taken steps toward blocking law enforcement from scanning facial features in public spaces, as part of broader efforts to regulate the riskiest applications of artificial intelligence.

Facebook’s face-scanning practices also contributed to the $5 billion fine and privacy restrictions the Federal Trade Commission imposed on the company in 2019. Facebook’s settlement with the FTC after the agency’s yearlong investigation included a promise to require "clear and conspicuous" notice before people’s photos and videos were subjected to facial recognition technology.

SAN DIEGO, Calif. -- Tech giants say they will not sell facial recognition software to police departments, for now.

It's a tool police departments have been using for years, helping solve everything from property crimes to cold cases and missing people.

But there's little oversight over the technology, and critics say it puts our privacy and civil rights in jeopardy.

While police often use the software to scan the mug shots of criminals, there's a good chance your photo is also in the system.

A 2016 Georgetown Law report found one in two American adults are in a law enforcement face recognition network. In addition to mug shots, social media photos and surveillance videos, many states also allow searches of driver's licenses databases.

Critics of the technology also point to inaccuracies in the software.

In 2018, researchers at MIT and Stanford University examined three commercially released facial-analysis programs from major technology companies.

The analysis showed an error rate of 0.8% for light-skinned men compared to 34.7% for dark-skinned women.

Steve Beaty is a professor of computer science at MSU Denver.

"It appears these programs have, what we call, biases in them. That they're biased towards certain skin tones, for example, and will make more mistakes with certain types of people than other types of people," said Beaty.

He says the bias can occur when the machines are trained.

"The computers I don't think have any inherent bias in themselves, but they can only learn from the data sets they're provided with," said Beaty.

If a machine sees more photos of white males while being trained, it will be able to identify them more accurately.

And while the technology has proven to be a useful-crime fighting tool, a case of mistaken identity can mean an innocent person ends up with police looking into their private lives unnecessarily.

"I think it's a good idea to take a step back and say what is it we as a society want from our facial recognition technology? That's exactly what Amazon has come out and said," said Beaty.

This week, Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on police use of their facial recognition technology, Rekognition. The company is calling on lawmakers to put in place stronger regulations to govern the technology's ethical use.

Microsoft also said it will not sell its software to police departments for now, while IBM is abandoning its facial recognition program altogether.

"Let's talk about what it means, and have the conversation, and make sure that we as a society, as a country, are comfortable with what the technology is being used for," said Beaty.

As companies reevaluate how police officers use their technology, the question remains if the public will do the same.