Meta to pay $1.4 billion over biometric data lawsuit

TheStreet’s Conway Gittens brings you the biggest news of the day, including what investors are watching and why Meta has to fork over $1.4 billion.

Transcript

00:00I'm Conway is reporting from the New York Stock Exchange. Here's what we're

00:03watching on the street today. Nervousness during the busiest week of

00:06earnings season knocked the Nasdaq lower but the Dow was in rally mode. Sales and

00:11profits at PayPal topped forecast and JetBlue swung to a surprise quarterly

00:15profit. Wall Street is awaiting the Federal Reserve's latest decision on

00:19interest rates. Chairman Jerome Powell is expected to lay the groundwork for

00:23September rate cut when the two-day meeting wraps up on Wednesday. Turning

00:28now to other headlines, a record 1.4 billion dollars. That's how much Facebook

00:34parent Meta has agreed to pay to settle a facial recognition lawsuit with the

00:38state of Texas. The lawsuit claimed Facebook was using facial recognition

00:43technology to illegally gather biometric data on millions of Texans. The

00:48information was extracted without users legal permission from photos and videos

00:53posted on the site. Quote, unbeknownst to most Texans for more than a decade Meta

00:59ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the

01:03photographs uploaded to Facebook capturing records of the facial

01:07geometry of the people depicted according to the office of Texas State

01:11Attorney General Ken Paxton. If you've ever used the tag feature on a Facebook

01:15post it's likely your biometric information ended up stored on Facebook's

01:20servers. Even though Meta got rid of Facebook's tag suggestion feature and

01:24announced in 2021 it was shutting down its facial recognition system, it

01:29continues to say it did nothing wrong. That'll do it for your daily briefing

01:33from the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Conway Gittins with the street.