Rudi (ryjelsum)i figure that this is worth a cross-website post:
some verification process that netflix has put in place to seemingly cut down on cross-household account sharing is a pretty significant photosensitive seizure risk, it sounds like
this is very much a tangent and besides the point so i'm not going to go poking at OP for information about what their network setup is like, but if their four different wifi networks are four routers all going to the same modem upstream then it sounds like netflix also might be sending the names of wifi networks or private ip addresses back to HQ which sketches me out but is not really surprising to me given the kind of lengths that netflix has been going to in order to cut down on account sharing
e: just want to emphasize that this is very much theoretical, and i don't really have a way to test it myself
enough people are speculatively responding to this that i went ahead and asked OP what's up with their network for more information. haven't got a response yet and frankly it sounds like OP wants to forget and move on which is very fair but if they give me any info i'll relay it since a fair few people are curious about this from a technical perspective it seems like
answer is that OP has two ISPs and that is what is seemingly triggering this. so it's kinda just a false positive of assuming one IP = one household it looks like. and it looks like the devices are smart TVs. so probably android based right? idk smart TVs since i have no interest in them. i guess that squares with my assumptions though.
the smart tv aspect is a complete unknown though because i would guess that they come with a netflix app preinstalled and it's not precisely what you would get from the google play store on a generic android device
i turned off the notifications on this post so idk if people are even passing it around still. i just know people like to probe at these things and see what companies are doing and it sounds like this is 'just' a false positive from slightly aggressive bad assumptions of a household only having (up to) one public ip address.
but regardless the verification process the OP describes is very weird, the precise manner they describe (a series of QR codes flashing that they had to record) suggests they're like, trying to establish that the person's in that place from that IP address in real time. weird shit either way
rj@rudi well _this_ is relevant to my interests
@arrjay i would be interested in testing it out myself to see what exactly they're looking for but i don't think we even have an active netflix account in the family right now
@rudi I think we largely watch via PC intermediation so I'm curious if this is something the app is doing, yeah
@arrjay i was thinking the same thing, wondering if it's only something they can really do as an android/ios app. kind of why i don't like company specific 'apps'
@rudi and _in theory_ ios is not supposed to reveal network information, so...yeah this is an unreliable signal at best.
(there's also an entire book of "what makes a family" in here but I suspect you're aware.)
@arrjay my thought is, given how OP's network setup sounds a little bit screwy they might have misfired something that's intended to differentiate 'households' behind a cg-nat setup or something like that. but these things are always intentionally a little bit opaque
13 barn owls in a trenchcoat@rudi @arrjay it's okay with four discrete Wi-Fi APs, correctly NAT'ed, which we have now that we have fibre, but we used to have four routers, each connected to its own 4G modem, and I bet that would have set off whatever OP triggered.
I can only speak to Netflix France, but it sounds like OP and I have similarly inconvenient-to-network rural architecture.
@HauntedOwlbear @rudi *looks over at 4G sticks*
oh, I could use some QoS to deliver a _really_ bad time.
Tony Petrangelo@rudi also besides the point, their WiFi sucks *because* they have four different WiFi networks.
HeppyCat@rudi That's where my mind went as well. I'm imagining some double and triple NAT going on.
keschi 
Θ@rudi When piracy has better UX, a shitty company can fuck off :)
Becky
Kevan
Jargoggles
Shadow D. Wolf 
🏳️🌈@rudi Good thing i canceled my Netflix sub back when they were caught downsizing a bunch of their LGBTQ staff a few years ago.
JW prince of CPH@rudi also, yet another example of what software engineers think are open-and-shot categories... aren't. Like, no service provider should get to dictate how many wifi networks you have for whatever reason that is none of their fucking business.
Andrea, Automancer, Sapphimancer ⚧️♾️@rudi Absolutely sounds like this should be a lawsuit to me.
Taureon@rudi did no one at netflix think about this for more than 5 seconds at all???
Sparky@rudi Fuck Netflix for making that process literally seizure-inducing. Fuck them. I hope OP's partner recovered from Netflix's assault.
But on a sidenote: ...were they using other people's/public WiFis or what's up with this "We have four WiFis, all of them suck" lark?
Bishop6 (Ed Alan T.)@Bright5park @rudi I can't speak to four WiFis, but at one of the places I live we have two because my housemate works from home and can't afford to just take the day off just because one of the two providers has an outage. And I'm just waiting for the shoe to drop and Netflix to tell me I'm in a different "household" when I'm at my weekend apartment which is only 40 miles from the other but is in a different country.
Delta Sierra
GlaireDaggers@rudi hm, I'd be interested in seeing if there's footage of this. Might have been a bug rather than intentional, tbh I've never heard of taking video of a QR sequence like that (a single code would normally suffice, and almost certainly easier to implement)
The website also doesn't seem to have any mention of a process like that fwiw
The website also doesn't seem to have any mention of a process like that fwiw
MIGRATED TO @@rudi and companies wonder why piracy is starting to come back
@rudi not that it ever went away, just that its becoming more common
GeoffreyWinn@rudi They should stop giving any money to Netflix!
NellyLorey@rudi this is what happens if you give a software developer an assignment and a variable