• Netflix recently unveiled a new password-sharing policy, which allows members of the same “household” to share an account.
• This policy is more of an anti-password-sharing policy, and assumes that there is a universal meaning of “household” and that software can determine who is and is not a member of a household.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation was involved in a forum created by the industry consortium Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) to limit video sharing to a single household.
• The forum rejected the suggestion of a family based in Manila, whose dad travels to remote provinces to do agricultural labor, whose daughter works as a nanny in California, and whose son does construction work in the United Arab Emirates as an “edge case.”
• After 9/11, people had to perform the bureaucratic rite of standardizing their name for recognition by machines with their database schema.
• Netflix is part of the “enshittification” cycle, in which the platform company first allocates surpluses to its users, lures them in, and then reallocates surpluses to businesses.
Published February 7, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Cory Doctorow’s original post Big Tech Wants to Tell You Who Counts as Your Family