I read this morning that Disney Plus is ending "password sharing" and that reminded me of a friend's problem with Netflix when they rolled this out. The issue was not the new Netflix policy; the issue was the corporate customer dis-service and lack of interest in fixing a problem which they had caused.
My friend moved out of the US and now lives in another country which was one of the first to implement the Netflix no-sharing posture. She had the premium package with endless bandwidth, multiple devices etc etc and was paying a lot which had been the case for nigh on 20 years.
Her elderly mother came to stay for Thanksgiving and brought with her her laptop. Note - her mother had her own Netflix account in the US, but as she was staying with my friend, in my friend's home, she opted to log in via their account.
A few weeks later, she returned to the US and watched her favorite show on Netflix. When my friend tried to log in, she received a message telling her she could not log in to her own account and had to become a subscriber. When she called Netflix, she was told that the registered address for her account was her mother's address in the US. When her mother had opened the Netflix movie, the system had noted the foreign account and had arbitrarily assigned it to her US address.
My friend pointed out that for nearly 20 years, the IP address had been the foreign one and had not changed. This was confirmed by Netflix. The bank for the automatic payment and the billing currency was the foreign one and this was confirmed by Netflix.
However the representative was unable to re-assign my friend's account to my friend's address. She said she would refer it to the technical team who would contact my friend.
After hearing crickets, my friend again called Netflix and again explained the situation. This time, the new representative put her on hold for a long time before coming back and saying my friend should close her account and then re-open it and set her home address as the new assignee. Apparently the credit, history etc would transfer across.
So she closed her account, waited a day and opened a new one. Netflix recognised the IP, and set the assigned address of the new account to her mother's address in the US. Same problem as before. She called Netflix, and another representative advised her to repeat the experiment but to wait seven days.
She did, and she did. and the same result. This time, the Netflix representative put her on hold for a long time, and came back and said that there was nothing they could do. They could not solve the problem of Netflix randomly and arbitrarily assigned her account to someone else's address simply because that person had used her account while visiting.
So my friend closed her account. The representative told her she would receive a two-week refund for not having been able to access Netflix, and she would not be billed the following month. Of course she didn't and she was. Netflix caused the problem, couldn't (or wouldn't) fix it and don't care. I hope that Disney Plus handle their password-sharing differently.
**Please leave questions and comments below.**
Further reading
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/4/24121189/disney-plus-paid-password-sharing-crackdown-june
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