Netflix Testing ‘Consumer-Friendly’ Ways to Crack Down on Password Sharing

Screenshot via Netflix.com.

Millions of Americans have turned to streaming services like Netflix to entertain themselves during the pandemic, and many of us are accessing their content with a password that is shared with friends or family members. That may be coming to an end, according to a report by the New York Times, as Netflix has quietly started testing a way to crackdown on password sharing.

Netflix subscriptions have boomed while we’ve all been spending more time at home — the company reported that it added 8.5 million new customers in the fourth quarter of 2020, for a total of 203.6 million subscribers — but the effort to address password sharing pre-dates the pandemic.

Gregory K. Peters, Netflix’s chief product officer, had said that the company was looking at “consumer-friendly ways to push on the edges” of the password sharing “situation” during an earnings call in October 2019.

Netflix’s terms of service do say that the content is “for your personal and noncommercial use only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your household,” so those sharing accounts have always been in violation of that, but the company seems cognizant of the risks of a major backlash if they enforce the rules with too heavy a hand.

The new feature Netflix is testing shows a message when users log in that said, “If you don’t live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching.” The users were then prompted to verify the account with a code that was sent to the account holder by text or email, or to sign up for their own Netflix account.

“The test also appears to be more of a nudge to buy a subscription than an iron-fisted crackdown,” wrote the Times. At this point, the verification message is not mandatory and can be bypassed to complete later, and people could share the verification codes as easily as they did the main account passwords.

Still, it may be enough to persuade some users to sign up for individual accounts, and the test will provide Netflix with valuable information to add to all their data files on, for example, exactly how many episodes of Schitt’s Creek I might have binged today.