Will Netflix’s Password Crackdown Kill The Joyful Communion Of Account Sharing?
Source: Vogue, Emma Specter
Photo: Getty Images
I don’t mean to brag, but I have my own Netflix account. This shouldn’t be surprising for a 27-year-old media employee, but to be honest, it’s a recent development; for years, I existed happily on my mom’s account, skewing her algorithm away from the French crime shows she favors and toward LGBTQ+ rom-coms. I still use one of my best friend’s family Hulu account, though (so frequently that she reluctantly made me my own profile), and I’m one of dozens of people hiding out on one Brooklyn writer’s mom’s HBO Go account like emperor penguins clinging to an ice floe.
I felt pressured to create my own Netflix account when I read that the streaming service would crack down on password sharing. Suddenly, I knew my time in the comforting womb of my mom’s account was coming to a close, and I opted to expel myself before she could drag me out. But the experience got me thinking: How many other people were out there, sharing Netflix accounts with their moms and their exes and their exes’ moms in a twisted, deeply online version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?
While using the Netflix account of someone you don’t know might sound like a recipe for a late-capitalist horror story, it can actually provide a strange sense of connection to a person you’d never otherwise interact with—and the weirder the connection, the better. “I’m using the Netflix log-in info of a guy my mom went on three Tinder dates with in 2017,” admits Ellie, a 25-year-old from Chicago, explaining, “If we get accidentally signed out, she just takes a picture of the TV error page, texts him the photo, and he responds with the email and password every time. I think he thinks it’s funny? It’s been four years of this, and I don’t think they talk about anything else.”
In some cases, shared Netflix accounts provide less of an arbitrary attachment than a link to the past. Laura, 25, from Solvang, California, who uses a Netflix account that belongs to one of her high school teachers, says, “I’ve probably had it since around 2013, when I graduated high school.” Considering that almost everything about a person can change over the course of eight years, from their job to partner to friend group to home city, it’s strangely comforting to think of a long-ago Netflix log-in as a fixed point of connection.
Netflix isn’t the only streaming service that creates strange bedfellows out of viewers looking to save themselves a monthly payment; Joanna, a 31-year-old from Austin, was using the Hulu account of “the brother-in-law of my ex–best friend turned first girl crush” until recently. But up until the new crackdown, lightly scamming Netflix just made good sense. A $13.99 monthly Standard subscription allows two users to watch Netflix on different screens at the same time, and a $17.99 Premium plan ramped that number up to four users. If those users ever felt guilty about taking Netflix for a ride, well, they could console themselves by checking out the company’s 2020 earnings report, with its $6.44 billion in revenue.
Some Netflix users began to notice signs of the incoming password-sharing apocalypse last month, when they logged onto a shared Netflix account and saw a message on their screen that read, “If you don’t live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching.” In the pandemic era, though, when many of us resorted to Netflix Party in order to trick ourselves into believing we were doing something close to going to the movies with our friends, Netflix’s sudden re-enforcement of its rules doesn’t feel right. We millennials have given Netflix the best years of our lives, canceling plans to stream The Crown the minute it dropped and reluctantly texting our exes for their boss’s sister’s log-in despite promising not to be in contact. Don’t we deserve more than this?
I’m admittedly not great about remembering to call my mom—or my dad, or my best friend in L.A., or anyone else I don’t see regularly in person—but when I logged onto her Netflix account and saw Call My Agent, Lupin, and all the other French shows she favors instead of my lineup of mid-aughts sitcoms and ’80s rom-coms, I felt two things: momentarily irritated (where was my content?) and then soothed. As many of us start cautiously plotting a return to normal life—and oftentimes finding it unexpectedly draining—the value of a bond that asks absolutely nothing of you, that puts you in passive touch with your loved ones just by inputting a password, feels all the greater. Don’t take that away from us, Netflix!