Texas sues Google claiming it is collecting people’s facial and voice data without their consent

The state of Texas has filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging that the internet firm unlawfully gathers face and voice-recognition data on millions of residents of the state without obtaining consent from those individuals.

According to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who announced the lawsuit on Thursday, Google, which is owned by Alphabet, is in violation of a state consumer protection law that requires people to both be informed and grant their consent before their biometric information may be collected. Google is also breaking a federal law that says businesses have to tell people when they collect their biometric information.

According to the complaint that was submitted to the district court in Midland County, Google has allegedly been storing voice prints and facial records through its products such as Google Assistant and Google Photos. People say that the second product analyzes facial features to sort and group images.

“Google has now spent years unlawfully capturing the faces and voices of both non-consenting users and non-users throughout Texas — including our children and grandparents, who simply have no idea that their biometric information is being mined for profit by a global corporation,” the suit states.

According to Google, Paxton is “mischaracterizing our products in another breathless lawsuit,” according to Google, which said in an email sent to CBS MoneyWatch that the company was dismissing the charges and promising to defend itself in court.

“Google Photos helps you organize pictures of people, by grouping similar faces, so you can easily find old photos. Of course, this is only visible to you, you can easily turn off this feature if you choose and we do not use photos or videos in Google Photos for advertising purposes,” an Alphabet spokesperson said. “The same is true for Voice Match and Face Match on Nest Hub Max, which are off-by-default features that give users the option to let Google Assistant recognize their voice or face to show their information.”

There are just a handful of states in the United States that have passed biometric privacy laws, and Texas is one of those states. These laws make it illegal to collect personal identifiers for use in business without first getting the person’s permission.

At the beginning of this month, Google came to an agreement to pay the state of Arizona $85 million to settle a lawsuit that was filed against it in 2020. The lawsuit alleged that Google had misled users by recording their locations even after users attempted to turn off the geo-tracking setting on their smartphone. According to Arizona, the businesses used the location data to generate billions of dollars in revenue from the sale of advertising. Google has said that they did nothing improper.