Google once again sued. This time it’s the work of one man, Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General. He has sued the Mountain View firm over its use of biometric data — facial, voice and finger recognition — which allegedly violates Texas law. Indeed, this law requires obtaining the consent of the user before collecting biometric data.
The prosecutor calls into question the “products and services such as Google Photos, Google Assistant and Nest Hub Max.“The lawsuit was filed in the Midland County District Court.”Google’s indiscriminate collection of personal information from Texans, including highly sensitive information like biometric IDs, will not be tolerated“, can we read in a press release from Ken Paxton.
Mordor in your living room
But the prosecutor more particularly incriminates the technology of Nest Hub Max and its Face Match function. The latter allows the device to analyze by facial recognition who is using the device in order to adapt to the user. Thus, for Ken Paxton, this forced facial recognition including biometric data is worthy of one of the greatest villains of the cinema saga: “For Face Match to work, the Nest Hub Max’s camera is designed like a modern-day Eye of Sauron, constantly watching and waiting to identify a face it knows.”
Google Assistant’s voice recognition is also in the sights. But what angers the prosecutor the most is the Google Photos application, and more particularly its Face Grouping function, or grouping of faces. A technology that analyzes the faces present in the photos in order to group them by similarity. Once again, for the Texan, it is illegal biometric data collection: “Many Texans don’t know or understand that Google powers Google Photos by recording and analyzing sensitive biometric information. […] Through the face grouping process, Google captures and stores sensitive biometric data […] and Google stores this data for an unreasonable period of time.”
Prosecutor Paxton has called for a jury trial as well as penalties of up to $25,000 per violation. Texas has also sought injunctions to prevent Google from collecting, storing or using biometric identifiers in the state without informed consent.