Texas Attorney General files lawsuit against Netflix for purported surveillance and addictive features.

      Attorney General Ken Paxton initiated a lawsuit on Monday, claiming that Netflix gathers user data without consent and employs autoplay features to encourage children to continue watching. Netflix has dismissed the lawsuit as baseless.

      The lawsuit, filed under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, contends that Netflix operates what it describes as a “surveillance machine” that collects approximately 5 petabytes of user behavior logs daily and processes more than 10 million events per second, supporting over 40,000 internal microservices.

      The complaint further alleges that Netflix integrates user data from its platform with information obtained from ad-tech partners, specifically naming Google Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk.

      The state is requesting the court to order Netflix to delete data it claims was unlawfully gathered, prevent the company from utilizing that data for targeted advertising without explicit user consent, and impose civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each violation.

      The complaint asserts that Netflix’s autoplay feature “creates an ongoing stream of content aimed at ensuring users, including children, remain engaged for prolonged periods.”

      Paxton’s office has positioned the lawsuit as part of a larger consumer protection initiative targeting minors and digital privacy.

      Netflix characterized the lawsuit as lacking merit. “With all due respect to the great state of Texas and Attorney General Paxton, this lawsuit is unfounded and rests on incorrect and misleading information,” stated a Netflix spokesperson, who declined to comment further on the ongoing litigation.

      This Texas case is part of a broader wave of regulatory and legal actions concerning data collection practices in streaming and platforms. Texas has previously taken similar consumer protection measures against Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap in recent years; some cases have been settled while others are still in litigation. Federal scrutiny of streaming data practices has been comparatively limited.

      The complaints regarding petabyte and microservices metrics are noted for their specificity. Netflix has discussed its internal architecture at engineering conferences and through blog posts; the figures referenced in the complaint seem to rely on publicly available engineering materials rather than internal documents revealed through discovery. The lawsuit does not present evidence beyond the public record at this point.

      The lawsuit was filed in a Texas state court. A preliminary hearing concerning jurisdiction and any motion to dismiss is anticipated within sixty days.

      It remains unclear if Netflix will seek to move the case to federal court, although streaming companies often favor that option in cases involving cross-state data flows and federal communication laws.

      Texas has not provided an estimate regarding potential civil penalties. However, the framework of $10,000 per violation, multiplied by the millions of users affected in Texas, could suggest a hypothetical total reaching into the high hundreds of millions of dollars.