Netflix Spies on Your Children and Sells Their Data — Texas Files Lawsuit
🔍 What exactly is Netflix accused of?
The Texas Attorney General's lawsuit is damning. It describes Netflix not as a streaming service, but as a surveillance company disguised as an entertainment platform.
- Viewing habits — every show watched, duration, time
- Detailed interactions — every click, pause, rewind, abandon
- Device data — phone type, tablet, smart TV
- Home network — information about your broadband
- App usage — what your children do outside of Netflix
- Behavioural profiles — sold to third-party advertising brokers
"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."
— Ken Paxton, Texas Attorney General, 11 May 2026😱 The lie since 2020
The most shocking part of this case: Netflix was openly lying to its subscribers. In January 2020, Reed Hastings, then Netflix CEO, stated on an earnings call: "We don't collect anything. We're really focused on just making our members happy."
In reality, Netflix was simultaneously collecting billions of behavioural events. It was only in 2024, after an investigation by the Dutch Data Protection Authority, that Netflix partially admitted in its privacy policy to collecting data such as "playback events (play, pause)", "app clicks" and "text input".
🎮 Autoplay: designed to make your children addicted
The lawsuit also targets the addiction mechanisms deliberately built into Netflix:
- Autoplay — automatic playback of the next episode creates a continuous stream impossible to voluntarily stop, especially for children
- "Dark patterns" — psychological design techniques to keep users connected as long as possible
- Children's profiles — Netflix claims not to run behavioural advertising on Kids profiles, but still collects all the data
🤔 Does this affect us outside the US?
This lawsuit concerns Texas, but the practices described are global. Netflix has over 325 million subscribers worldwide, including millions in the UK and Europe. The ICO (Information Commissioner's Office) in the UK or EU regulators could take up the issue, as the Dutch Data Protection Authority did in 2024.
- Check the privacy settings of your Netflix account at netflix.com/account
- Disable autoplay on your children's profiles: Manage profiles → Autoplay
- Limit data sharing: Account → Privacy and data settings → Disable "Use my data to improve Netflix"
- Use a dedicated Kids profile with parental controls enabled — even if Netflix collects data, this limits exposure to inappropriate content
- Talk to your children about screen time and autoplay
- Netflix denies the allegations: "This lawsuit lacks merit and is based on inaccurate and distorted information"
- Netflix claims to "comply with privacy and data-protection laws everywhere we operate"
- The matter will be decided in court — but the data collection practice itself is confirmed in Netflix's own privacy policy
Questions about protecting your children's data?
CyberGuard answers all your questions about online privacy — free and jargon-free.
🤖 Talk to CyberGuard →