Netflix: page about account sharing was online ‘by mistake’

Netflix has removed the controversial account sharing rules from its website. The company wrote about a new policy last week, but now says it was published online ‘by mistake’. Netflix was widely criticized after it posted the rules.

Netflix says against in a response The Streamable that last week’s help page about controversial account changes were “a mistake.” “There was an article online for a short period of time that contained information that only applied to Chile, Costa Rica and Peru,” said a spokesman for the company. The rules have since been amended. Netflix also says the new password-sharing policy won’t just roll out “without communicating it to customers first.” The company continues to experiment with ways to prevent account sharing.

Earlier this week, there was a lot of controversy when Netflix published a help page explaining the rules for sharing accounts. Under those new rules, all devices must log in from the primary account location at least once a month. There were many angry reactions from users who found the rules unfair and who could think of dozens of situations in which they were disadvantaged, even if they did not share their account with others.

In this way, Netflix hopes to prevent account sharing between different users. The company has been struggling with this for years and is trying to persuade users in various ways not to share accounts with others. Over the past year, Netflix has conducted many different experiments to find the best way to prevent account sharing. This usually happened in individual countries. The message that the company now put online was also on the help page for Costa Rica, but could be read internationally. According to the company, that was the mistake: the page should only have been readable for Costa Ricans, Chileans and Peruvians.