Zuckerberg to Be Deposed by Texas Over Meta Facial Scanning (1)

Mark Zuckerberg can’t avoid being called for a deposition in Texas’s multibillion-dollar lawsuit alleging that Meta Platforms Inc. profits from facial recognition technology without user consent, a state appeals court ruled.

Tuesday’s decision left in place a lower-court order compelling Zuckerberg’s testimony after Texas argued the social network company’s chief executive officer has “unique personal knowledge” of information relevant to the case.

The 2022 suit alleged that Facebook monetized people’s faces without their permission until late 2021 while maintaining a database of facial profiles. Meta announced in November 2021 that it would no longer use facial recognition for photos and videos shared on Facebook following a $650 million legal settlement the year before.

Texas also claimed in the complaint that Facebook “has been secretly subjecting all photos uploaded to Instagram to its facial-recognition technology” for commercial gain — even though the company has maintained that it doesn’t use biometrics on the photo-sharing platform.

Wielding multiple laws that allow for penalties of $25,000 per violation, the state is seeking billions of dollars from Meta.

Meta declined to comment.

Read More: Texas Sues Meta Over Facebook’s Dropped Facial-Recognition Tech

(Updates with Instagram allegation in fourth paragraph.)

--With assistance from Ryan Autullo.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Rachel Graf in San Francisco at rgraf27@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou at megkolfopoul@bloomberg.net

Peter Blumberg, Steve Stroth

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