Texas Sues Netflix Over Alleged 'Surveillance Machinery'

Texas just sued Netflix, alleging the company runs "surveillance machinery" that logs five petabytes of user-behavior data per day — and that the tracking applies to kids' profiles too. Attorney General Ken Paxton filed Monday in Collin County District Court under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The complaint alleges Netflix processes more than 10 million behavior events per second across more than 40,000 internal microservices, tracking viewing habits, devices, home networks, and app usage to build a behavior profile. It alleges Netflix then shares that profile with data brokers Experian and Acxiom, plus ad-tech platforms including Google Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk. The state is asking for fines up to $10,000 per violation, an injunction stopping the data collection and sharing, a court order making Netflix purge data it allegedly collected illegally, and a separate order turning off default autoplay on kids' profiles. Netflix has not yet responded. None of these allegations have been tested in court. Texas isn't the first regulator to look at Netflix's data practices. In December 2024 the Dutch Data Protection Authority fined Netflix €4.75 million for GDPR transparency violations between 2018 and 2020; Netflix is appealing. Sources: https://therecord.media/texas-sues-netflix-over-data-practices-surveillance https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/11/netflix-sued-by-texas-for-allegedly-spying-on-children-addicting-users.html https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/netflix-sued-by-texas-attorney-general-addictive-spying-on-users-1236744936/ https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-sues-netflix-spying-texas-kids-and-consumers-illegally-collecting-users More on cybersecurity, privacy, scams, and homelab on Hake Hardware. New shorts every weekday. #privacy #netflix #surveillance