- Netflix users asked to add email addresses to their individual profiles
- The platform claims this will enable separate connections while offering even more personalized recommendations.
- It sounds convenient on paper, but users think it could lead to another big crackdown
Sharing Netflix accounts today isn’t as easy as it was in the mid-2010s, but now the top streaming service has another account crackdown that’s already hurting people.
A handful of users have noticed a new pop-up in the app asking each member of a shared account to add individual email addresses to their individual profiles, instead of using the account owner’s email address as the primary address. One of the most shocking aspects is that the pop-up only clears if the request is fulfilled.
This hasn’t rolled out to all Netflix account holders yet, but the company informed Ars Technica that the new login update began on June 15, so we imagine a wider rollout is inevitable. The outlet also said that this pop-up does not apply to profiles labeled as belonging to children.
Netflix household accounts have always been built on the traditional “one email, one password” basis, allowing you to create up to five profiles to separate watchlists and recommendations from other members of your family. Everything is about to change, but why Netflix has decided to launch a new crackdown is the question on everyone’s mind.
According to the details mentioned in the pop-up, this is for convenience only. Assigning individual email addresses to individual profiles under a single account means that you no longer need to keep using the account holder’s email address to log in every time. This also means that if you ever need a verification code to log into Netflix, you won’t have to search for the account holder in their inbox.
Additionally, the pop-up also states that adding an email address to your profile will make it much easier for you to recover the account when needed and get personalized content recommendations with more features coming soon. On paper, it appears that Netflix is adding this requirement to improve the user experience, but subscribers are convinced that it is just another way for the company to monitor user activity.
When Netflix launched its password crackdown in 2023, it ended an era of serial account sharing and was where the service decided that an account was strictly for one household, the “Netflix household” in official terms. With its latest initiative, we believe there is more than meets the eye, just like the vast majority of online users.
Bye Bye profiles on Netflix. So fishy. Sheesh. from r/netflix
Over the past few weeks, Reddit has seen a flurry of reactions to the pop-up’s initial appearances, but the main concern expressed by users is the possibility of it turning into a payment system, charging account holders extra expenses just to add more profiles. “This is killing Netflix for me,” one user added.
Based on Netflix’s past crackdowns, the new requirement could also give the streaming giant another way to better distinguish activity from individual profiles, or even transfer them to individual accounts later. But even as users have expressed outrage over this, some say they have found a workaround.
It appears that creating email aliases helped some users bypass the pop-up without providing Netflix with all their information. However, this only worked for those using Gmail.
One person in particular says that you can change your Gmail address to create an alias, giving for example that if your email address is “[email protected]”, you can set up “[email protected]”. They go into more detail in their post on Reddit, while others in the answers that use this workaround for other situations have confirmed that it works.
As mentioned, this update has not yet reached all Netflix subscribers and is rolling out slowly, similar to how the platform launched its password crackdown. Given Netflix’s history, we’re definitely keeping an eye out for this one.
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