Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday sued Netflix, alleging that the streaming platform has been spying on children. The high-stakes lawsuit has been filed in Collin County, which claims that Netflix has been collecting the data of minors and their families for years without consent while advertising itself as a privacy-focussed platform.
Paxton has accused Netflix for misleading its consumers with deceptive data collection practices. The lawsuit has alleged that Netflix — which caters to over 300 million paid users globally — was in breach of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act which is put in place to shield consumers from “false, misleading, and deceptive” business practices.
The streaming giant has been blamed of maintaining the track records of its paid subscribers and selling their preferences to AdTech firm. As per the lawsuit, the company has generated billions of dollars from such deals.
Paxton posted an update about the lawsuit on X confirming the development.
“Netflix is not the ad-free and kid-friendly platform it claims to be. Instead, it has misled consumers while exploiting their private data to make billions. Netflix has built a surveillance program designed to illegally collect and profit from Texans’ personal data without their consent, and my office will do everything in our power to stop it,” said Paxton.
Back in 2020, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings had claimed that the platform does not collect anything. He had made the statement comparing Netflix to contemporaries like Amazon and Google among other.
Paxton has challened this claim by Hastings in his lawsuit, seeking civil fines of upto $10,000 per violation. Netflix had not commented on the situation as of press time.
It appears that Netflix’s legal battles are far from coming to a halt. Last year, the platform lost a legal fight in Rome that had assused the platform of repeatedly hiking subscription prices. In April this year, a court in Rome ruled Netflix to refund millions subscribers.