Florida’s attorney general has sued Netflix, claiming the company told parents its kids profiles were a safe, separate space while quietly recording how children used them.
Story Snapshot
- Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a 66-page complaint against Netflix.
- The state alleges Netflix recorded what children watched, paused, rewound and skipped inside kids profiles.
- It claims that information fed the advertising business Netflix launched in November 2022.
- The suit asks the court to order data deleted, change how the service is designed, and impose penalties.
- Netflix says the case has no merit, that it follows privacy law, and that it does not run behavioral advertising on kids profiles.
What the state says happened
The complaint describes a simple arrangement with a sting in it. Netflix offers parents a separate profile for children, along with kid-focused features like Netflix Playground and Netflix Games. Florida says that while parents understood this as a walled-off area, the company was logging children’s activity in detail: which shows they opened, how long they stayed, where they hit pause, what they rewatched, what they abandoned.
On its own, tracking what people watch is ordinary for a streaming service. It is how recommendations work. The state’s argument is about who was being watched and where the information went. Once a company knows a viewer is a child, the law asks more of it. Florida claims Netflix crossed from improving the service into building commercial value out of children’s habits, and that parents were never plainly told.
The advertising question at the center of it
Netflix started selling advertising in November 2022. The complaint’s central claim is that the information gathered from children ended up connected to that business, through the partners streaming services use to match advertisers’ own customer lists against viewer behavior. Florida argues that even without a straightforward sale of data, combining collection, matching and profiling on known children breaks state law when it is not narrowly limited and honestly disclosed.
That distinction matters more than the word “selling,” which gets used loosely in these arguments. There are really three separate things: gathering information about a child, passing it or a linkable identifier to an outside company, and building a profile that predicts what a child likes. The state’s filing reaches all three. Which of them actually happened, and on what scale, is what the case will turn on.
What Florida is asking for
The remedies requested go further than a fine. The state wants the underlying data deleted, and it wants Netflix to purge anything built from it, including the recommendation systems and advertising audience groups that children’s activity may have helped shape. That is a demanding request. It would require Netflix to trace exactly where children’s information traveled inside its own systems and show the court a map of it.
Florida is pleading two kinds of violation, which gives the court more than one route. One is deception: did marketing a “safe, separate space” mislead parents? The other is a direct data-rights claim about known minors. Even if the strongest version of the allegation does not survive, a finding that sharing or profiling went undisclosed could still support an order forcing changes.
Netflix’s answer
The company’s position is flat denial. Netflix says the lawsuit lacks merit, that it complies with privacy law everywhere it operates, that it maintains safeguards for children, and that it does not use behavioral advertising on kids profiles. It has said it will defend the case.
At this stage that is where things stand: a detailed complaint on one side, a categorical denial on the other. The documents that would settle it — contracts with advertising partners, engineering records showing what data moved where — are not public. They will come out, if they come out, through the litigation rather than through press statements. Texas brought a similar action against the company, so Florida is not alone in asking these questions.
Why this reaches past one company
Any service that offers a children’s mode alongside an advertising business is watching this case. If Florida’s theory holds up, those companies will have to prove — not just assert — that children’s activity is walled off from advertising systems. If Netflix shows a clean separation, it effectively writes the compliance manual everyone else follows.
For parents, the practical lesson is narrower and more useful. A kids profile is a content filter. It controls what a child can find. Whether it also limits what the company learns is a separate question, and one worth asking of any service in the house, not only this one.
Sources:
myfloridalegal.com, politico.com, hunton.com