Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, is required to participate in a deposition in a Texas lawsuit concerning the company’s face recognition technology.
In a decision on Tuesday, Justice Jeff Rambin of Texas’s Sixth Court of Appeals stated that Meta’s recent appeal, which sought “relief from an order compelling the oral deposition” of Zuckerberg at an undisclosed date, was denied by the state court.
Declaring that Meta had been “capturing and using the biometric data of millions of Texans without properly obtaining their informed consent to do so,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the complaint in February 2022. Moreover, Texas’s attorneys said that Meta had broken the Deceptive Trade Practices Act of the state by “failing to disclose information—including the fact that it collects biometric identifiers—with the intent to induce Facebook users in Texas into using Facebook, which such users would not have done had the information been disclosed.”
The state of Texas argued in Tuesday’s decision that Zuckerberg “had unique personal knowledge of discoverable information” pertinent to its complaint, which claimed Meta had broken state laws pertaining to the gathering of biometric data and misleading business practices.
In 2021, Meta paid $650 million to settle a class action lawsuit pertaining to facial recognition. According to the attorneys’ filing at the time, they claimed that it was one of the “largest settlements ever for a privacy violation, and it will put at least $345 into the hands of every class member interested in being compensated.”
Requests for comments from Meta were not answered.
