Netflix Said “We Don’t Collect Anything.” Texas Just Filed 59 Pages.
The headline is autoplay. The actual lawsuit is 59 pages about Netflix collecting 5 petabytes of user data per day — including from children — and selling it to Experian and Google while Reed Hastings told investors "we don't collect anything."
In January 2020, Reed Hastings was on an earnings call with investors and said, with apparently no hesitation: “We don’t collect anything.” Texas AG Ken Paxton filed a 59-page lawsuit against Netflix on May 11, and that quote is in it. The complaint’s headline is “addictive autoplay design” — which is the kind of language that generates coverage — but the real lawsuit is about a company that sold itself as the streaming service that wasn’t spying on you, while allegedly feeding your behavioral data to Experian, Acxiom, Google, and The Trade Desk the entire time.
The numbers in the AG’s complaint are not subtle. Netflix allegedly collects 5 petabytes of user behavior data per day, processing 10 million events per second — every pause, every rewind, every abandoned episode logged and packaged. That data, according to the filing, was then shared with ad-tech platforms including Google Display & Video 360 and The Trade Desk as part of the expanded ad-supported tier Netflix rolled out in 2024 and 2025, and sold to data brokers like Experian and Acxiom who combined it with off-platform data to build full consumer profiles. This is exactly the infrastructure the lawsuit describes as a “surveillance machinery.” And the children’s angle — that kids’ profiles were included in the data collection without meaningful parental consent — is where the legal exposure is most concrete. The complaint was filed in Collin County, Texas, under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
Reed Hastings told investors “we don’t collect anything.” The 59-page complaint quotes that back at him. That’s not a grandstanding lawsuit — that’s a document you have to answer for.
Reed Hastings told investors “we don’t collect anything.” The 59-page complaint quotes that back at him. That’s not a grandstanding lawsuit — that’s a document you have to answer for. Netflix’s response — “this lawsuit lacks merit and is based on inaccurate and distorted information” — is what every company says on day one of a lawsuit, and it tells you nothing about where this ends up. The autoplay angle will carry most of the coverage: the idea that queuing the next episode before you’ve decided to watch it constitutes “deceptive design” is an aggressive legal theory, and probably the weakest part of the case. But the specific relief sought on that front is narrower and more dangerous than the headline suggests. The complaint asks courts to disable autoplay by default on children’s profiles — not ban the feature, just flip the default for kids. That’s a small enough ask that a judge might actually grant it, and a granted injunction on kids’ autoplay defaults becomes a template the next state AG uses on adult profiles.
The political timing is worth acknowledging without letting it swamp the substance. Paxton filed this lawsuit the same week he announced his Texas Senate campaign, which is the opposite of a coincidence. He has filed similar DTPA suits against Google and Meta — both still active — and his track record of high-profile tech cases that generate more press than verdicts is real. The counterargument writes itself: this is a Senate candidate with a Big Tech grievance, a flexible state statute, and an election to win. That’s all true. It’s also irrelevant to whether Netflix fed children’s behavioral data to Experian while its founder told investors otherwise, which is a question that deserves an answer regardless of who’s asking it. Platform accountability and child safety have a consistent throughline across the industry, and as covered here on what happened when Roblox actually invested in child safety, the financial incentives cut in exactly the wrong direction. Nobody is lining up to fix this voluntarily.
Netflix built its brand on being the streaming service that was different — no ads, no tracking, just content. That identity started dissolving when they launched the ad tier, and the data infrastructure that tier required made the old positioning quietly untenable. The 59-page complaint is just making it loud. Paxton will get his Senate campaign press, Netflix will get its day in court, and at the end of it, someone will have to explain on the record how Reed Hastings ends up in a 2020 earnings call saying “we don’t collect anything” while the company was apparently doing exactly that. That’s the question worth watching — not whether autoplay is addictive, which everyone already knows.
Sources: Variety · Texas AG Press Release · NBC News · Courthouse News · Deadline · The Statesman
