Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Monday against Netflix, alleging the streaming service illegally collected data from children and consumers without consent and designed its platform to be addictive.<\/p>\n
The complaint, filed in Collin County state court, accuses the Los Gatos, California-based company of misrepresenting its data practices to consumers for years, Reuters<\/a> reported.<\/p>\n According to the lawsuit, Netflix tracked and sold viewers\u2019 habits and preferences to data brokers and advertising companies, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue.<\/p>\n Paxton\u2019s office took aim at what the complaint calls \u201cdark patterns\u201d engineered to keep users watching. The lawsuit specifically cites the autoplay feature that immediately begins a new show after another ends.<\/p>\n \u201cNetflix\u2019s endgame is simple and lucrative: get children and families glued to the screen, harvest their data while they are stuck there, and then monetize the data for a handsome profit,\u201d the complaint stated.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you watch Netflix, Netflix watches you.\u201d<\/p>\n The lawsuit references Reed Hastings, Netflix\u2019s chief executive at the time, who said in 2020, \u201cwe don\u2019t collect anything,\u201d as he attempted to distinguish the company from competitors like Amazon, Facebook and Google on data practices.<\/p>\n Paxton alleges the streaming service\u2019s surveillance violates the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. His office is seeking to force Netflix to delete all illegally collected data and cease using such information for targeted advertising without user consent. Texas is also pursuing civil fines of up to $10,000 per violation.<\/p>\n The legal action reflects a broader trend of lawsuits targeting online businesses and social media companies for tracking users and selling data to third parties for advertising purposes.<\/p>\n The lawsuit comes as Paxton, a Republican, is currently running for U.S. Senate against U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.<\/p>\n Read the original article on silive.com<\/a>. Add silive.com<\/a> as a Preferred Source by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Monday against Netflix, alleging the streaming service illegally collected data…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[105865,105862,105864,105863,1967,14409,27,4479,29,28],"class_list":["post-288939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-california-based-company","tag-collected-data","tag-data-brokers","tag-data-practices","tag-ken-paxton","tag-netflix","tag-texas","tag-texas-attorney-general","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}