(LifeSiteNews) — Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit accusing streaming giant Netflix of illegally collecting users’ data without their knowledge or consent, including children.
In a press release summarizing the lawsuit, Paxton’s office alleges that the company “uses intentional engineering to track and log users’ viewing habits, preferences, devices, household networks, application usage, and other sensitive behavioral data,” applying to children and adults account alike, despite publicly maintaining “that it did not collect or share extensive user data.”
“Netflix has then disclosed this information to commercial data brokers and advertising technology companies, where it was combined with data collected from other platforms to build detailed consumer profiles,” the press release says. “Netflix users’ data is essentially shopped across Big Ad Tech’s shadowy network. The company earns billions of dollars every year from secretly selling consumer data.”
“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,” Paxton declared. “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. I will continue to work to protect Texas families from deceptive practices by Big Tech companies and ensure that corporations are held accountable under Texas law.”
Maintaining that Netflix is in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, Paxton is seeking damages of up to $10,000 per violation. Netflix boasts more than 66 million subscribers in the United States alone, and while it does not publish subscription breakdowns by individual state, even calculating damages for a small portion of Texas’s population of 32 million would represent an astronomical sum. The lawsuit estimates Texans are responsible for $1.5 billion of the company’s annual revenue.
“In short, Netflix sold subscriptions to its programming as an escape from Big Tech surveillance: pay monthly, avoid tracking,” Paxton said. “Texans trusted that bargain. Netflix broke it – constructing the very data-collection system subscribers paid to escape.”
Data privacy is far from the only controversy to plague the streaming giant. Netflix has gained some praise from conservatives in recent years for platforming figures such as comedian Dave Chappelle who are willing to challenge “woke” orthodoxy. However, it remains stridently left-wing in its overall content choices, including children’s cartoon Ridley Jones, which features a “non-binary” animal character, the documentary Pray Away that presents a biased, hostile depiction of the “ex-gay” movement, animated fantasy movie Nimona, whose LGBT themes alienated even left-wing Disney, and CoComelon Lane, which promoted same-sex parenting and child cross-dressing in a 2023 episode.
Last December, an analysis by Concerned Women for America found that 41% of both G-rated and TV-Y7-rated shows on Netflix contain content positively portraying homosexual relationships or transgenderism.