Ars TechnicaNetflix crackdown on account sharing hits US with $8 fee for each extra user
"Your Netflix account is for you and the people you live with," email tells users.
Dan S. Camper 🇺🇸@arstechnica I’m interested to see if I get one of these letters.
My wife and I are slowly moving to a new house. We spend weeks in one house, then weeks in the other. Will #netflix notice that I access their services from only one location at a time?
Thomas H Jones II@dancamper @arstechnica It'll be interesting to see how this impacts their subscribership amongst those who VPN to get access to different regions' content.
@ferricoxide @arstechnica Netflix already deals with users who use VPNs, so they likely have ways of detecting VPN usage with a certain degree of accuracy (well-known VPN providers’ exit IP addresses, for example). But otherwise, I would think it would be a similar problem: A single account that appears to jump around, geographically.
The press release indicates that they will be using IP addresses plus “account activity” to determine if an account is being shared. Let’s hope they can identify “slight abnormal non-sharing activity” correctly!
Yeah, previously, indications had been that any given device marked as a "home" device would have to reconnect to the service through its home location every 30 days.
If you travel for a living (like I used to) you're presumably fine with your phone so long as your travel-schedule brings you home at least once a month (not always the case when I was traveling to Europe). Presumably, if you're a VPN-user, you would need to VPN-lessly connect monthly, too, to re-home.