r/netflix • u/Altruistic_Lad • Jul 12 '25
Technical Support Dear Netflix: Registering Is Now Worse Than Tedious
Netflix apparently has never heard that folks can have more than one residence. Does it learn that you visit the same places over and over. Oh no. You have to jump through all the registration and security hoops OVER AND OVER despite the fact that you've paid for unlimited use. Wake up, Netflix. You're not irreplaceable.
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u/reindeermoon Jul 12 '25
No, they definitely do understand that some people have more than one residence. They just figured out that they can make more money if people are required to pay separate fees for each one. They don't care about customers, they just want to make more money.
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u/SnootyToots8 Jul 13 '25
My kids go between two different homes and can't use their account on a rainy flipping day.
It's unfair.
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 13 '25
There is a way to do it for up to I think two weeks. It’s a pita to have to do it. For the record, I think it stinks too.
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 12 '25
I don’t think that’s it. They are after cheaters. Too bad they pissed off long time customers. I dropped them three weeks ago. I had them since the mailing CDs days. No big loss I find.
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u/ludog1bark Jul 13 '25
Yeah, we all know that big businesses are not in it for the money and only for the customer service. They definitely don't want our money that's for sure.
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 13 '25
I was happy to oblige. I watch about 4 hours a week so really, I should have dropped them years ago since hubby prefers Hulu anyway.
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u/Opening_Acadia1843 Jul 13 '25 edited Jul 14 '25
I think it’s ridiculous that it’s considered “cheating” to want to be able to watch Netflix in multiple places. I tried watching it on my phone at the gym the other day and that triggered the error message 🙄
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 13 '25
I don’t like the policy anymore than you do. It would be naïve to think that there aren’t people who cheat by sharing, passwords with others who don’t pay for it. The unfortunate reality is those of us who aren’t breaking the rules gets screwed by those who are.
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u/Opening_Acadia1843 Jul 13 '25
I don’t see how that’s cheating though. There’s still a limit on how many people can watch at once, so why should it matter if you share the password with your friend?
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 13 '25
If your friend doesn’t live in the same home with you, and you share your password with them to watch somewhere else, that is theft of a product they didn’t pay for. If you invite your friend over to watch with you, that is not theft. If you pay for a subscription for up to 4 televisions in your home at once, and everyone is watching Netflix, it’s still not theft to invite your friend over making the number of viewers 5. Anything else is theft. Cheating by sharing your password is theft. I hope this clears it up for you.
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u/Opening_Acadia1843 Jul 13 '25
That isn’t theft any more than lending a dvd to your friend is theft
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u/TheDeadlySinner Jul 13 '25
When you give away your DVD, you no longer have the DVD. A more accurate comparison would be copying the DVD and giving the copy to your friend.
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u/Austin1975 Jul 13 '25
It’s not one dvd though. It’s a membership service. You’re loaning out an entire service of show and movie collections.
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u/Ambitious_Can4485 Jul 13 '25
The sad thing is they used to encourage password sharing. Thats why people are mad about it. Of course, they are a company that can do whatever they want but personally I don't regret cancelling my subscription.
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 13 '25
Netflix isn’t worth it to me. Most of the content they have that I would like to watch. I’ve already watched. My new plan is to subscribe for one month per year and then cancel. That’s what I do with all the rest because I don’t watch much TV to begin with. I don’t watch sports. It’s no big loss to me really except for the fee that I was paying. But I’m not paying it anymore.
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u/predictingzepast Jul 13 '25
'First ones free' business model, give it away at first to drum up customers, then charge
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u/Opening_Acadia1843 Jul 13 '25
Then let’s say it’s an album of your whole DVD collection.
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u/Austin1975 Jul 13 '25
I think of it more like abuse than theft. Like an all you can eat buffet where the average families eat x amount and that is reasonable. But then you have these extreme families who eat way more and sit there all day and tell others how to do it etc. There needs to be some balance.
For awhile a lot of us were sharing the same Netflix account well beyond mom & dad a friend. I mean I was on someone’s account who was a friend of my roommate along with a bunch of others. At the same time I would like for the writers and artists to get more of the profit that Netflix is making which was supposedly one of the reasons behind the new tiers and ads models.
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 13 '25
Wrong. You bought the DVD. You don’t own the content on Netflix.
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u/jcutta Jul 13 '25
You bought the physical DVD but the actual product license isn't what you own you own the DVD itself with a private use product license. If you actually owned the content of the DVD then copying it wouldn't be technically against the law.
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 14 '25
Splitting hairs aren’t you? One DVD, one private use but that use could be anyone and you can sell it. Of course I never had rights to anything else. I didn’t make or distribute copies. I know what is legal but lots of people on this sub think sharing isn’t theft. WTF.
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u/Opening_Acadia1843 Jul 13 '25
I mean, you own it for as long as you pay the monthly fee
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u/PlantedSlanted Jul 13 '25
You own nothing digitally. You pay for the rights to view the content for as long as they want you to be able to. Digital content is not for consumers. It's for big businesses to make money. It's why buying a digital copy of a movie costs equally as much or more than a physical Blu-ray or something. It doesn't cost more to let you watch it digitally, but they can get the same regardless because "people will buy it because it's more convenient".
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u/jcutta Jul 13 '25
It was never "cheating" or "theft" until the streaming services decided to make it so. If I pay for an account and said account allows 4 different profiles and allows 4 simultaneous streams it shouldn't matter where those streams are.
Now because they made this change in how they consider an account is allowed to be used they're screwing with (in Netflix case especially) nearly 20 years of learned customer behavior and to do so they're using tactics that drive long time account holders to tell them to fuck off.
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u/emeraldamomo Jul 14 '25
You had people sharing passwords to a dozen different households. Hell I did it with my brother, both my mom and me were using his Disney account for a few years.
It's annoying but I understand that streaming companies weren't happy with it.
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u/PlantedSlanted Jul 13 '25
No. Its definitely more money. I split time between places and use netflix at both. I got locked out everywhere but my primary residence. Including like... On my phone at work, or while travelling. So i called them, and they were like "well, you can add another location to your account for extra money." So i cancelled my account. Fuck them. You pay for the high end ad free one, and then you can only use it inside your home. Nope. Definitely not irreplaceable.
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u/jrr6415sun Jul 13 '25
Every day I read Reddit posts of people quitting yet every quarter their subscriber numbers grow and grow 🤔
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u/reindeermoon Jul 13 '25
Yeah, they know exactly what they are doing. It doesn't matter to them if some people stop using Netflix, because their profit keeps going up and up.
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u/lightreee Jul 13 '25
they are after cheaters
That is true at the start of their crackdown to juice the subscriber numbers but more they know people accept it, it’s just a “line go up” situation
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u/InnerWrathChild Jul 12 '25
It’s why I unsubscribed last year. TV in my bedroom started telling me I wasn’t on the account. Well now no one is.
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u/StoneGoldX Jul 13 '25
I tried. Then someone sat on the remote, accidentally pressed the Netflix button, and like magic I was automatically subscribed.
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u/cyphr0n Jul 13 '25
And that’s how people keep resubscribing. My kid’s account requires no parental consent to resubscribe.
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u/tfrisinger Jul 13 '25
Yep every time I go to my other place it’s the same not part of household BS.
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u/sknic17 Jul 13 '25
As long as people keep paying them they will keep getting away with it.
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u/ludog1bark Jul 13 '25
Yep, I've often wondered how any business would hold up if we agreed as a collective to unsubscribe at the same time and not used their service for an entire month, but I know that there would be a group of people who would say they can't be bothered and the peasants should just accept they can't afford that service.
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u/Krandor1 Jul 13 '25
They likely wouldn’t even if you could get everybody to do so and the result would be a lot of unemployed people.
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u/TheDeadlySinner Jul 13 '25
If you can't afford Netflix, then you have much bigger issues than Netflix.
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u/Gojirahawk Jul 12 '25
The thing is.. We paid for those extra screens.. It should not matter where they are being accessed from, and who is accessing it. It would be like a car company getting upset if you let someone borrow yours.
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u/JCliving Jul 12 '25
Please don’t give them ideas, they already want to charge you for things like using the heated seats already installed in your car. 😂
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u/TheDeadlySinner Jul 13 '25
It's amazing that people keep making this deeply stupid comparison. When you let someone borrow your car, then you cannot also drive it at the same time.
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u/Altruistic_Lad Jul 13 '25
Uh. It's easy enough for Netflix to monitor if multiple IP addresses are using their service from your account at the same time. This isn't that at all. Simple answer is to tighten that up which would keep my wife, when traveling, from watching at the same time I do. But we could live with that. We are NOT going to live with the current setup.
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u/ImaginaryGirlDD Jul 12 '25
It sucks we just grit our teeth pay the extra fee to have my parents household included to avoid those hassles
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u/Altruistic_Lad Jul 13 '25
But it doesn't avoid the hassle. We pay separately for my daughter. But we still get ding'd when we move from the living room to the bedroom in the same damn house.
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u/ImaginaryGirlDD Jul 14 '25
It doesn’t happen for us. The TVs and devices all stay signed in and can just jump right whenever wanting to watch.
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u/CCWaterBug Jul 15 '25
That's not normal, and is definitely allowed.
We have it on xfinity, fire stick, tablet and one cell, no issues, ever.
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 13 '25
It does suck. It’s why I canceled. I have a tiny apartment near a major hospital where my husband has been after a tough surgery. Recovery has taken months. So I rented this place. It’s still only me watching and I had the same issue everyone is angry about. That’s why I canceled my Netflix account. But some people just want to be able to share password and don’t want to recognize that it’s theft.
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u/Nimras186 Jul 14 '25
Sharing passwords isn't theft in anyway and form, in fact Netflix originally even encouraged it, but now they don't, but stealing it isn't if you truly think it is then you don't know what theft is.
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 14 '25
I’m sure it’s the reverse. Theft is the actual crime of stealing. Providing access to unauthorized people for the purpose of consuming digital content they have not paid for is theft. Also, you don’t have the right to share it. Go read the TOS.
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u/Nimras186 Jul 17 '25
Yes yes they updated their TOS lol.
Sharing isn't theft or stealing again not what theft and stealing is.
If it was theft or stealing in anyway or form would require someone to be using YOUR account without your knowledge while you "paid" for the subscription.
You sharing your password is just that you letting someone access to your account breaking the they updated sure, but that is it, no matter how much they change language, EULA, TOS, T/C and so forth to make it sound like theft and stealing is it not in anyway form that.
Stop trying to use terms wrongly just because you don't get the difference.
But before they updated their TOS, EULA, T/C and more did they encourage it even said you where allowed to share, so your comment about TOS goes out the window, Netflix changed their contract without as I was on the service when it was allowed without my consent which is one of the things I hate about people defending these subscriptions and more, if a company want to make their terms worse sure do it to new subscribers, the fact they can change these things at anytime and even without telling us I know they did on sharing is wrong in my eyes I know you find people thinking this is ok.
So no sharing isn't bad in anyway, yes Netflix has the rights to not accepting it and when someone breaks their TOS guess what Netflix reserves the rights to cancel their subscription or punish their account with what they can watch if they don't terminate the subscriptions for breaking their TOS, you see they can't call the police, they can't press charges because again this is neither theft or stealing if it was you would see court cases all over the world from these companies against the people sharing and having fun.
Really need to learn the difference on these things. Also as far I am concerned sharing isn't wrong or a problem not with the prices these services charges for crap, 4K isn't actually 4K can't use browser or PC, ads and more and content being edited or removed because of weird things.
There are to many streaming service, to much cost to see the content you want and they are getting greedier and greedier for me to defend their please don't share so if someone wants to share let them who cares, if it is a problem remove their accounts if they don't stop or limit what they can watch, which they already can do.
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 17 '25
Your convoluted explanation of sharing vs theft is total BS.
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Jul 20 '25
Stop letting your brain go durka durka open your damn eyes and realize that it is not theft. This lower guarantee guy is a fight right I haven't seen you remotely or seemingly agree with a small part of what some of these people are saying about not being theft, and they have commented on almost everybody's post. They make some very valid points and some are a little biased or maybe a lot but you have to understand something has to be taken or forcefully taken unwillingly in order for it to be theft whether it's digital or physical it has to be unwilling to be theft.
A store cannot gift you of a physical item or digital and then call the cops on you for stealing it when you walk out the door.
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u/twilightluvrxx Jul 14 '25
This is an issue that has bothered me for a while now with Netflix. I share an account with my Mother and every week I get logged out and I have to go through the process of getting Netflix to send her a text and so she can approve my login. I would think after awhile it would recognize that I am not a hacker since she always approves it.
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u/noideawhatimdoing444 Jul 16 '25
Netflix cracking down on password sharing was a huge reason why I canceled all my streaming services. Now I run a plex library with more content than netflix.
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u/mokshmodi96 Jul 15 '25
I agree, I have the same issues as you and I have started working on my plex server. Much better and I also see a behavioural change my life.
You know when I can stream Netflix, I would just tirelessly search, binge and then snack a lot. Till the series is completed, than wondering weather it was worth it.
Since moving to plex, it now requires me to plan ahead and thus, cutting so much on my binge watching. So glad, now spending more time with family.
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u/EuphoricRent4212 Jul 15 '25
Cancelling my Netflix this month. Just realized YouTube premium is cheaper and that’s where I watch 75% of my content anyway. Netflix is a ripoff
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u/Cigator Jul 18 '25
I'm confused. Couldn't netflix just limit an account to 2 simultaneous connections at a time
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u/Prime88 Jul 12 '25
The sad thing is every streamer is doing this or planning to do the same eventually.
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u/ludog1bark Jul 13 '25
Yep, eyes are on Netflix to see how they do. Sadly it's benefiting them so more should do the same.
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u/BootyMcSqueak Jul 13 '25
I have to re-sign in IN MY ONE HOUSE! If I watch it upstairs, I might be signed in. Go back downstairs to watch something else or continue my show? Guess what? You’ve been signed out!
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u/Timbo303 Jul 13 '25
I dont understand why they even bothered charging for the multiple homes addon. All they had to do was require 2fa for netflix accounts that way they are harder to crack and they would easily get money and not worry about losing customers.
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u/Nimras186 Jul 14 '25
2fa isn't hard to crack, plus even if they did would not do what they are trying to do stop you from using netflix away from your home because they think your sharing.
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u/Timbo303 Jul 14 '25
Thats the point is to deter hackers. There are a bunch of hacked accounts being sold every day on the clear web even.
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u/Nimras186 Jul 17 '25
You only deter the normal to medium skilled hackers, if there is a market for netflix account will it not solve a thing. I do not know if there is off course but I do get why 2FA is a good thing.
Just not sure if Netflix needs it but if the hacked accounts is that rampant as you say then it might be a good thing to reduce the numbers a little
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u/grazzyphase Jul 14 '25
I've always been a huge Netflix supporter even when they got a huge backlash couple years ago I still stood by them because they paved the way for online streaming but I had to stop paying the exorbitant fees that they started charging 9 months ago and I just can't afford them anymore and it's really sad to be honest this is where they are
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Jul 13 '25
[deleted]
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 13 '25
Yes, it will work that way if you follow their little sign in every two weeks. This is exactly the boat that I have been in and the reason why I ended up canceling.
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Jul 12 '25
How are they supposed to stop password sharing? Yours is an edge case. Majority of people have one residence.
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u/NattysRubi Jul 12 '25
password sharing
Who cares as long as it's not being shared among a large amount of people. Sharing between two single people like an aging parent or a college bound child is perfectly acceptable in my books ...
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 13 '25
How can they tell? You’re only sharing it with one older parent or a student at college? They need a better system than the one we have today for sure. Meanwhile, bye-bye Netflix.
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u/NellyNel11_ Jul 13 '25
My parents always shared their streaming services with me. My parents reside in Georgia and I do not, so when Netflix made this change I could no longer use it. I just stick to my $2.99 a month for Disney/hulu instead and use other free services to watch what I want.
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u/Lower_Guarantee137 Jul 13 '25
That’s the answer. Most people are more than a little upset when something they’ve always taken for granted is taken away.
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u/giraffe_on_shrooms Jul 12 '25
Children of divorce have entered the chat
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u/PissantPrairiePunk Jul 13 '25
Exactly what I said…have they never heard of kids w/ more than 1 residence, or who go to their grandparents sometimes, or college students, or people who go on business trips and maybe wanna watch a show in their hotel room?
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u/Altruistic_Lad Jul 12 '25
Poor little Netflix. Barely making ends meet. Maybe ask Google. They have no problem doing it with YouTube TV.
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Jul 12 '25
Is stealing your normal course of action? Sorta scummy.
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u/betterAThalo Jul 12 '25
netflix used to promote password sharing. if it was stealing they shouldn’t have done that.
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u/Salt-Plum-1308 Jul 12 '25
So if I pay for an account that has 5 profiles, why does it matter where those five people are located? I’m still paying for the users. That’s not stealing.
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u/Inkdrunnergirl Jul 12 '25
Netflix used to encourage password sharing. I pay for 4 screens and should be able to use them how I desire. How is it theft when you are literally paying for the service? Against current tos maybe but not theft.
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u/Altruistic_Lad Jul 12 '25
So I'm stealing to watch Netflix using an account I pay for. Maybe you need to go back to law school for a refresher, little cupcake.
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u/just_having_giggles Jul 12 '25
I don't give a shit how they "stop password sharing"
They got me to completely unsubscribe by doing something I DO give a shit about - making the product into hot garbage and a pain in the ass to use by logging me out of my bedroom all the time.
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u/Opening_Acadia1843 Jul 13 '25
They already limit the number of people who can watch on one account at the same time unless you pay for more screens. Why should they care?
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u/netflix-ModTeam Jul 14 '25
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