If you thought Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown a few years ago was bad, you’re about to be even more pissed off. Netflix is rolling out an update that requires every profile under your shared household account to have its own unique email.
Over the last few weeks, Netflix subscribers have been prompted to add an email address directly to their profile instead of just using the primary account’s email, according to multiple reports on Reddit. It’s part of a permanent change that started rolling out on June 15, a Netflix spokesperson confirmed to Ars Technica. We’ve reached out for clarification, and will update once we hear back.
For context, Netflix lets you have up to five different user profiles in the same account so that each user can have different recommendations tailored to their tastes. Until now, one email and password controlled the account regardless of how many profiles were on it.
That’s appears to be changing as Netflix tightens guardrails to keep subscribers from sharing their accounts across multiple households. Now, a screen pops up informing subscribers of “personalized new ways to enjoy Netflix” along with a prompt to enter their email address. The alert says this makes it easier to log in, recover your account, and get improved personalized suggestions.
On paper, this added step makes some sense, since it means you don’t have to bug the owner of the primary email address every time you want to sign in on a new device. Profile owners and account owners can now also set their own language, audio, and display settings separately, Cord Cutters News notes. The other two benefits, though—simplified account recovery and better recommendations—are less convincing, especially since the latter was already available before the change.
Some users are speculating that assigning email addresses to individual profiles could eventually help the company identify users more precisely — or even make it easier to split them into separate accounts in the future. Critics argue that Netflix doesn’t actually need this information and is instead looking for even more ways to track viewers and bombard them with advertising. Those concerns aren’t entirely unfounded, as Netflix’s privacy policy states that it may share users’ email addresses with marketing and advertising partners.
For now, the feature appears to be rolling out gradually. I made a new profile on my Netflix account and wasn’t prompted to tie a new email address to it before streaming the latest movies and shows. Still, given Netflix’s recent push to crack down on account sharing, it’s worth keeping an eye on whether this is simply a helpful quality-of-life feature or another step in how the company manages accounts.
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