Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit accusing Netflix of spying on children and other users by collecting their data without their consent and by designing its platform to cause addiction.
Paxton said the surveillance he accuses Netflix of practicing violates the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
The state of Texas said in the lawsuit that Netflix had been telling users for years that it did not collect or share their data, when in fact it was tracking viewer habits and preferences and selling it to commercial data brokers and ad technology companies, generating profits amounting to billions of dollars annually.
The California-based company was also accused of secretly using “hidden patterns” to keep users from watching, including an autoplay feature that starts a new show when another show ends.
A Netflix spokesman said that the company intends to respond to these accusations in court.
“With all due respect to the great state of Texas and Attorney General Paxton, this lawsuit lacks merit and is based on inaccurate and distorted information,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Netflix takes customer privacy seriously and adheres to privacy and data protection laws everywhere we operate.”
He wants the company to delete the data it collected illegally, and not use the data in targeted advertisements
targets without users’ consent, and pay civil fines of up to $10,000 per violation.
