Look, let’s be honest. Sharing passwords is as endemic to the Netflix experience as having your favorite show canceled two seasons in. So when the streaming service starts testing ways to curtail that practice, it understandably riles up the many, many people who have come to expect communal accounts as a matter of course. And yes, it is always annoying when a gravy train goes off the rails. But even if it’s not Netflix’s top priority here, you’re much better off keeping your password to yourself.
The limited test that Netflix introduced this week is basically a form of two-factor authentication, the kind you hopefully already have on most of your online accounts. Some users have begun to see the following prompt when settling in for a binge: “If you don’t live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching.” Below that, there’s an option to get a code emailed or texted to the account owner, which you can enter to continue watching.
“We’re still learning. We’re definitely in the very, very early stages,” said a source familiar with the trial. “The intent is not to enforce, right now, it’s really to learn how we verify the information so we can balance the scales away from security issues that can come up from unauthorized sharing.”
Yes, security issues. And while Netflix’s flirtation with a password-sharing crackdown is by no means altruistic—not that anyone has read the netflix password sharing crackdown silver lining
