Netflix Sued by Republican Texas Attorney General, Who Alleges Service Is Designed to Be ‘Addictive’ and Is ‘Spying’ on Users

Netflix is in the crosshairs of Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, who filed a lawsuit against the streaming giant, alleging violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

According to Paxton’s office, Netflix has been “spying on Texans, including children, and collecting users’ data without their knowledge or consent.”

In addition, the lawsuit alleges that Netflix has designed its platform to be addictive, including through its “autoplay” function that “creates a continuous stream of content intended to keep users, including children, watching for extended periods of time.” Other services that use similar “autoplay” functions include YouTube, Disney+, Prime Video, Hulu, Apple TV and HBO Max.

Netflix did not ​immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Texas AG’s lawsuit was filed May 11 in Texas District Court in Collin County.

According to the suit, Netflix operates a “surveillance machinery” that currently collects roughly 5 petabytes of user-behavior logs per day while processing over 10 million events per second to fuel over 40,000 internal “microservices.”

In addition to sharing data with advertisers, Netflix “opens its users’ data to commercial data brokers like Experian and Acxiom,” the lawsuit says. The company also has “partnered with dominant ad‑tech platforms, including Google Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk, to further enable Netflix user data to be merged with information collected off the platform.”

“Texans would be shocked to learn how extensively Netflix shops their data across Big Ad Tech’s shadowy networks. But under Texas law, consumers should never be left in the dark — users are entitled to the truth through clear and forthright disclosures,” the State of Texas lawsuit says. “Yet Netflix earns billions of dollars every year by quietly deploying the exact playbook it publicly eschewed to lure consumers in the first place. Netflix’s years-long bait-and-switch has led the company right to where it promised never to be: addicting children and families to its platform, mining those users for data, and then converting that data into lucrative intelligence for global advertising juggernauts. Simply put, this is deceptive conduct that violates Texas law.”