Netflix Promised No Ads And No Tracking. Florida Says It’s Building A Spy Machine
The State of Florida has filed a major lawsuit against Netflix, alleging that the streaming giant spent years misleading subscribers about its data-collection practices before quietly using that personal information to launch a multi-billion-dollar digital advertising business.
The complaint, filed on Sept. 9 in the Circuit Court of the Seventh Judicial Circuit in St. Johns County by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, accuses the company of violating the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and the Florida Digital Bill of Rights.
According to the 66-page filing, Netflix originally built its subscriber base by marketing itself as an ad-free, privacy-focused alternative to Big Tech platforms like Google and Facebook. The state points to past public statements from company executives, including a 2015 declaration from former CEO Reed Hastings that there would be “no advertising coming onto Netflix. Period.”
Hastings also told investors in early 2020 that the company was not tracking or gathering bulk consumer data: “We don’t collect anything. We’re really focused on just making our members happy, and we’re not tied up with all that controversy around advertising.”
Despite those public assurances, the lawsuit claims Netflix was operating behind the scenes as a massive data-logging apparatus. The complaint cites remarks from a Netflix engineer describing the company as “really a [data] logging company … a logging company that occasionally streams movies.”
State attorneys allege Netflix recorded billions of granular user actions each day across smart TVs, tablets, and mobile devices. These tracked behaviors included specific playback events, pauses, rewinds, keyword searches, browsing habits, content abandonment times, and user locations. The lawsuit states Netflix collects approximately five petabytes of user-behavior logs per day and processes more than 10 million events per second to feed its internal systems and train proprietary algorithms.
The lawsuit takes particular aim at Netflix’s marketing around children’s profiles. Florida officials allege the company promoted kids profiles as distinct, safe spaces where children would not be tracked or targeted. While Netflix told parents it does not run behavioral ads on kids accounts, the state argues the platform still quietly monitored and recorded children’s viewing habits and telemetry without clear disclosure.
The state also targets platform design features, arguing that default settings like autoplay function as “dark patterns” designed to keep viewers—especially minors—glued to screens. According to the filing, extended viewing sessions served to maximize the volume of behavioral data extracted from households.
Florida argues this years-long data collection culminated in November 2022, when Netflix launched its ad-supported subscription tier. Rather than relying solely on basic contextual ads, the state alleges Netflix integrated its stockpile of user behavioral logs with third-party data brokers such as Experian and Acxiom, alongside ad-tech platforms like Amazon DSP, Google Display & Video 360, The Trade Desk, and LiveRamp. Under Florida law, transferring sensitive personal data—including data gathered from known children—without clear consumer consent constitutes an unlawful sale of personal data.
In the suit, the state is asking the court to permanently bar Netflix from using deceptive data practices and force the company to purge all user data collected under misleading pretenses, including all information gathered from children’s profiles. The lawsuit also seeks statutory civil penalties ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 per violation, with treble penalties sought for violations involving children.