Texas AG Sues Netflix Over Data Harvesting, Autoplay
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- Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit on May 11 in Collin County District Court alleging Netflix violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act by collecting user data without consent and making the platform addictive.
- Netflix is accused of operating “surveillance machinery” that logs roughly 5 petabytes of user‑behavior data per day, processes over 10 million events per second, and runs more than 40,000 internal microservices.
- Netflix allegedly shares collected data with advertisers and commercial brokers such as Experian and Acxiom, and partners with ad‑tech platforms Google Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk to merge data for ad targeting.
- Reed Hastings is quoted from a January 2020 earnings call saying “We don’t collect anything,” while Netflix launched an ad‑supported tier in late 2022, contradicting its earlier anti‑advertising stance.
- Dutch Data Protection Authority prompted Netflix in 2024 to add granular interaction details (playback events, app clicks, text input, duration) to its privacy policy, after which the company still allegedly collected such data without clear disclosure.
- Kids profiles on Netflix are said by the Help Center to be free of behavioral advertising, yet the lawsuit claims Netflix still collects and analyzes children’s viewing events and uses household estimates for ad audience measurement.
- Netflix faces a request to disable autoplay by default on children’s profiles and to stop “unlawful collection and disclosure of user data” as part of the injunctive relief sought by the state.
Why it matters: If the court enforces the suit, Netflix could be forced to disable autoplay on kids’ profiles and halt data sharing with advertisers, affecting its ad‑supported revenue stream and raising privacy standards for streaming services, while Texas asserts consumer protection and could reshape industry privacy practices.
