Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is expanding his legal campaign against tech companies with a new lawsuit against Google. He accuses the Internet giant of creating biometric profiles of people without their consent. According to a lawsuit published on Thursday, Google violated a Texas data protection law. It’s about both face and voice recognition.
The lawsuit targets Google’s photo service, the language assistant Assistant and technology belonging to the group’s smart home brand Nest. Among other things, it is pointed out that the assistant can record the voices of all people present in a room, even if they have not consented to the processing of their data. The assistant has a personalization function for which users’ voices must be distinguished from one another. For Google Photos and Nest, the lawsuit attacks the feature that bundles images and videos with specific people in them.
In February, Paxton sued the Facebook group Meta for a similar reasoning over an earlier function in which users were automatically recognized in photos. In 2020, Facebook settled a lawsuit in the state of Illinois, which also has a law protecting biometric data, by paying $650 million. Google agreed to a $100 million settlement there.
Google rejected the allegations. Paxton is again misrepresenting Google products in another “breathless lawsuit,” a spokesman told the Wall Street Journal. Clarity will be provided in court.
The Texas Attorney General has been suing tech companies for years. Among other things, he filed a competition lawsuit against Google in 2020 together with his colleagues from several other states.
This year, Paxton pushed ahead with a Texas law that threatened to paralyze the removal of hate speech and violence from American online platforms, among other things. It banned online services with more than 50 million users from taking action against any user opinion. The US Supreme Court blocked the law. It was sparked by claims by conservatives that their views were being repressed by platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The companies deny this. In particular, supporters of ex-President Donald Trump and he himself raise such allegations. (dpa)