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Texas sued Netflix on Monday, accusing the streaming company of spying on children and designing its platform to be addictive
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Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said Netflix has for years falsely represented to consumers that it did not collect or share user data, when it tracked and sold viewers’ habits and preferences to commercial data brokers and advertising technology companies, making billions of dollars a year.
Key facts
- He wants the company to purge data it collected illegally, not use the data for targeted advertising without users’ consent, and pay civil fines of up to $10,000 per violation
- Texas’s complaint quoted Reed Hastings, the former Netflix chief executive, as saying in 2020 “we don’t collect anything,” as he sought to distinguish Netflix from Amazon, Facebook and Google
- Paxton, a Republican, is running for the US Senate, challenging incumbent Republican senator John Cornyn
- In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive products that had harmed young people, opening the floodgates for thousands of similar lawsuits that will be decided
Summary
Texas sued Netflix on Monday, accusing the streaming company of spying on children and designing its platform to be addictive. The Los Gatos, California-based company was also accused of quietly using “dark patterns” to keep users watching, including an autoplay feature that starts a new show when a different show ends. Texas’s complaint follows a spate of lawsuits targeting tech companies over features that the plaintiffs have said are addictive and dangerous to children. Paxton said Netflix marketed itself as a safe haven from data-hungry social networks when, in fact, it was engaged in similar information harvesting.