Big Tech Wants to Tell You Who Counts as Your Family
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Since both parents have an account, the child in question will always be at a location where validated devices exist.
If the child has their own device and returns weekly to where ever their device is homed, their device will always be valid.
There is no issue here and no little girl "coping with the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, would have to keep calling up a media company to get their TV access unblocked"
"I suggested that one test case should be a family based in Manila, whose dad travels to remote provinces to do agricultural labor, whose daughter works as a nanny in California, and whose son does construction work in the United Arab Emirates."
I can see an issue with a parent who travels for periods longer than a month such as the "agricultural labor" here, but why would Netflix need to support adult children who live and work full time in other countries? Of course they should have their own accounts.
The licensing in those locales is different & the list of acceptable content is different in them as well. Netflix cannot simply give a child access to that content because their parents happen to be in another country. It's a violation of their licensing agreement and also can land them in jail in some circumstances.
People don't generally share Amazon accounts with too many people because it means shared viewing and purchase history of content outside the Amazon Prime Video catalog (for example, medicines etc).
Same with Apple. Shared Apple accounts often mean lots of shared content (apps, sometimes camera photos) so people don't do it outside of people they trust.
The only "techno-hubris" is thinking they can determine this by IP address.
Convince is one of the few things Netflix still has going for it, and they're about make using their service a pain in the ass for a lot of paying customers. Not a smart move.
I'm totally fine with netflix going after abusive sharing. If 30 people are logging in with the same account from IPs all over the country/world by all means cut them off, but people who signed up for family plans and pay for access to netflix over a certain number of screen should get exactly that without being hassled.
I haven't been bitten by this yet personally, but once I have been I'll be reevaluating my subscription and I strongly suspect I'll either be canceling entirely, or at the very least going to a much cheaper plan that better represents what I'm actually getting from Netflix.
Netflix uses information such as IP addresses, device IDs, and account activity to determine whether a device signed into your account is connected at your primary location.
I have 2 family members counting myself on my account and each of us have a different static public IP address but within the same CIDR block so I guess that is the end of Netflix for me?
I have three dynamic IPs on different CIDR blocks. They'll change if the MAC address of my firewall changes, so I wonder what happens if I swap my firewall.
I wonder how strict the checks will be. I can easily send my siblings a VPN gateway with wireless using the same SSID as I do.
"This Is What Netflix Thinks Your Family Is"
The title here sounds like tech companies are breaking up families or something. Also the use of "big tech" is another lumping all large companies into an issue that is related to Netflix
It's also only between $10 and $20 a month. Two drinks at a bar can be $20
But...
> Two drinks at a bar can be $20
That entirely depends on where the bar is. I've paid $10 a drink before, but that's an above average price in my area. It also doesn't alter the fact that for millions of people, $20 is a lot of money. They aren't dropping money on expensive drinks at a bar on the regular.
As for Netflix's self-produced content, too many shows dropped inconclusively after two seasons discourages investment in new IP.
So now for a lot of people, Netflix is charging triple what they signed up at, for less than half as much content.
Sure, they were forced into it, a lot of this was the big publishers realising they could take their content and run their own streaming service. But for a lot of people, the appeal of Netflix was "the legal site with all the TV" and that's increasingly in the past.