There was a popular meme not too long ago where a gang of floundering millennials, each bringing a skill or boon to the table, managed to add up into a functioning adult. One held a valid driving licence, one could cook edible food, and one – well, one had a Netflix account.
This referred to the common practice of the account holder allowing friends and family to piggyback on their login details. I say ‘referred’ in the past tense advisedly, since there’s been a flurry of articles in pretty much every outlet of the yellower press insisting that Netflix is about to clamp down hard on this practice. This scare was prompted by an offhand comment from Netflix CPO Greg Peters in an interview about the company’s third quarter earnings: when asked how they were planning to address the issue “without alienating a certain portion of [their] user base”, Peters gave the fairly non-committal response “We continue to monitor it, so we’re looking at the situation. We’ll see those consumer-friendly ways to push on the edges of that.”
The leap in logic, from this vague comment in a fairly dry interview to ‘they’re coming after you, you freeloaders’, does at least make a certain kind of sense. The benefits of having more people paying for the service are obvious: this is why the world of videogames now leans more towards online play, with each individual using a console of their own, rather than a couch-based experience of several people using a single console. Not too long ago, music streaming service Spotify began semi-regularly checking their users’ locations to prevent account sharing, as well as – more controversially – banning people outright for blocking adverts while using their service.
More crucially, Netflix is facing increasing competition. Where once they were the streaming service, you’ve now got a litany of others cutting into their market share, so given that it’s understandable they’d be looking at ways of tightening their purse strings.
However, if you take Peters’ comments at face value, rather than leaping to the most alarmist interpretation possible, the takeaway is that they’re trying to deal with the really big offenders, but someone who lets their pal down the street use their account will probably be safe. According to research company Magid, only 9% of users of streaming services share their login details – although, in justification of the meme, this fraction is skewed heavily towards millennial users, 35% of whom apparently share their details.
(As this is roughly one in three people, presumably the other two are piggybacking on them.)
In that light, all this press seems like a bunch of ersatz puff pieces for tech firm Synamedia, name-checked in most of these articles as the people who are developing an AI which will use machine learning to spot users who are sharing their details. Well, sounds terrifying – unless you’re familiar with some of the other vain attempts to use machine learning to police the web. Most notoriously, there was blog platform Tumblr’s ill-fated use of algorithms to crack down on pornography. What this actually resulted in was any picture featuring too much skintone (and by this I mean white skintone) in it being censored, while greyscale .gifs of pornography of the most top rank stayed as ubiquitous as before.
The wider question is of course one of privacy, given the speculative plan is to look at users’ real-life locations: however, I’m afraid to say that ship has long since sailed. It’s been public knowledge for some time now that the world’s security services can check up on you via your devices. Compared to that, a tech company fumblingly working out that different houses are watching Netflix on the same account is baby-tier.
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