The Texas attorney-general is suing Facebook parent Meta for billions of dollars over claims that it harvested and exploited citizens’ biometric data without proper consent through its recently-shuttered facial recognition system.

The complaint filed on Monday by Ken Paxton, Texas attorney-general, accused the social media platform of collecting millions of biometric identifiers gathered from photos and videos posted on the platform “without their informed consent”, in breach of state privacy laws.

This included the face-scan data from Facebook users — as well as people who had not signed up to the platform but were featured in other users’ content — which was gathered in order to train the platform’s facial recognition technology “for its own commercial gain”, the complaint noted.