Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has filed a lawsuit against streaming giant Netflix alleging that the service is not only programed to be “addictive” to users, but is also “spying” on its customers.
Paxton filed the lawsuit under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act., and alleges that Netflix is “spying on Texans, including children, and collecting users’ data without their knowledge or consent,” according to Variety.
Paxton also alleges that the streamer’s content algorithm is created to make addicts of customers with an autoplay function that “creates a continuous stream of content intended to keep users, including children, watching for extended periods of time.”
The lawsuit points out that for years Netflix sold itself as free of any advertisement, only to turn around in 2022 and launch its lower priced, ad-supported plan.
Indeed, as late as January of 2020, then-CEO Reed Hastings insisted that “We don’t collect anything. We’re really focused on just making our members happy, and we’re not tied up with all that controversy around advertising.”
“In short, Netflix sold subscriptions to its programming as an escape from Big Tech surveillance: pay monthly, avoid tracking,” Paxton’s filing states. “Texans trusted that bargain. Netflix broke it — constructing the very data-collection system subscribers paid to escape.”
The suit, filed on May 11 in the Texas District Court of Collin County, aims to stop Netflix’s “unlawful collection and disclosure of user data.”
Paxton’s filing adds that Netflix runs “surveillance machinery” collecting about 5 petabytes of user-behavior logs daily and process some ten million events per second to run more than 40,000 internal “microservices.”
Netflix then sells that info to companies such as Experian and Acxiom, the suit claims. And user data is also shared with Google Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk, the filing says.
“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, Paxton’s 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,” Paxton added.
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