Category index

Surveillance

Cases where a company collected, retained or sold information about people who did not agree to it — and a regulator, court or the company's own documents said so.

Surveillance Settled · $1.4B 30 Jul 2024

Texas takes $1.4 billion off Meta for scanning faces without asking

Largest settlement ever obtained by a single state. The claim: Facebook harvested biometric identifiers from uploaded photos and videos through automatic tag suggestions, in breach of the Texas biometric statute and its deceptive-trade-practices act. Meta admitted nothing and floated building data centres in Texas in the same breath.

Surveillance Settled · $391M 14 Nov 2022

Forty states, $391 million, and location history that kept recording

A multistate coalition settled with Google over location tracking that continued after users believed they had switched it off. Indiana and Washington later took $29.5 million, California $93 million, Texas $1.375 billion.