Texas AG sues Netflix over alleged spying and addictive design

Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the suit on Monday, alleging Netflix collects user data without consent and uses autoplay to keep children watching. Netflix calls the suit meritless.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Netflix on Monday, alleging the streaming company collects user data without consent and designs its platform to be addictive, particularly for children.

The suit, filed under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, claims Netflix runs what it calls “surveillance machinery” that collects roughly 5 petabytes of user-behaviour logs each day and processes more than 10 million events per second to power over 40,000 internal microservices.

The complaint also accuses Netflix of merging on-platform user data with off-platform information collected by ad-tech partners, naming Google Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk.

The state is asking the court to order Netflix to purge data it says was collected unlawfully, to bar the company from using ...