Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued streaming service Netflix, alleging that the company collects users’ and children’s data without their consent while making the platform addictive.
The complaint alleges that Netflix built a “behavioral-surveillance program of staggering scale” that “requires getting Texans and their children glued to the screen and then extracting every possible piece of data about them.”
The suit alleges that Netflix plans to “monetize the data for a handsome profit,” though Netflix has denied it sells its data to third parties, including in the complaint. The document quotes Netflix CEO Reed Hastings from a January 2020 earnings call, in which he said the company was different from competitors like Amazon and Meta.
“We’re not integrating everybody’s data. We’re not controversial that way,” Hastings had said, according to the complaint.
Netflix is the most popular streaming service, and its main source of revenue has been primarily subscription-based, though it added ad-sponsored tiers in 2022. The company’s subscriptions currently range from streaming with ads for $9 to premium with Dolby Atmos and 4K for $27.
Netflix has been through the courts over privacy concerns before: the company paid $9 million to settle a lawsuit alleging it shared user data back in 2011, though it denied any wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, in 2022, the Texas AG settled with Google after alleging it collected biometric user data without explicit consent, via services such as Google Photos, Google Assistant and Nest Hub Max.
In March, Google and Meta were found liable in a lawsuit brought by a 20-year-old woman who alleged that YouTube and Instagram were designed to be addictive to children, paving the way for other platforms and streaming services to be potentially held liable for addiction.
Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
