Texas AG sues Netflix over alleged spying and addictive design
May 12, 2026 – 8:38 am
Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the suit on Monday, alleging Netflix collects user data without consent and uses autoplay to keep children watching. Netflix calls the suit meritless.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Netflix on Monday, alleging the streaming company collects user data without consent and designs its platform to be addictive, particularly for children.
The suit, filed under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, claims Netflix runs what it calls “surveillance machinery” that collects roughly 5 petabytes of user-behaviour logs each day and processes more than 10 million events per second to power over 40,000 internal microservices.
The complaint also accuses Netflix of merging on-platform user data with off-platform information collected by ad-tech partners, naming
Google Display & Video 360
and The Trade Desk.
The state is asking the court to order Netflix to purge data it says was collected unlawfully, to bar the company from using that data for targeted advertising without explicit user consent, and to impose civil fines of up to $10,000 per violation.
The complaint alleges that Netflix’s autoplay function
“creates a continuous stream of content intended to keep users, including children, watching for extended periods of time.”
Paxton’s office has framed the lawsuit as part of a broader consumer-protection push focused on minors and digital privacy.
Netflix called the suit meritless.
“Respectfully to the great state of Texas and Attorney General Paxton, this lawsuit lacks merit and is based on inaccurate and distorted information,” said a Netflix spokesperson in a statement, declining further comment on pending litigation.
The Texas case sits alongside a wider regulatory and litigation arc focused on streaming and platform data-collection practices. The state of Texas has pursued similar
consumer-protection actions against Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap in recent years; some have settled, others remain in active litigation. Federal-level scrutiny of streaming data practices has been more limited.
The petabyte and microservices figures cited in the complaint are unusual in their specificity. Netflix has previously discussed its internal architecture at engineering conferences and in blog posts; the figures in the complaint appear to draw on publicly disclosed engineering materials rather than internal documents obtained through discovery. The lawsuit does not yet attach evidence outside the public record.
The suit was filed in state court in Texas. A first hearing on jurisdiction and any motion to dismiss is expected within sixty days.
Netflix has not indicated whether it will seek removal to federal court, although streaming companies typically pursue that route in cases that implicate cross-state data flows and federal communications law.
Texas has not specified an estimate of the civil penalty exposure, although the $10,000-per-violation framework, multiplied across what the state estimates as millions of affected Texas users, could imply a theoretical ceiling well into the high hundreds of millions of dollars.