Many believe Netflix has shot itself in the foot by prohibiting account sharing, which its competitors like HBO Max, Prime Video, and Disney+ appear not to be doing, and this is causing mass cancellations, user cancellations that will migrate to competing services.
For a long time, there has been a plethora of information that commented on the various methods that Netflix was going to use to determine which was our primary connection and which was the secondary one, and thus to determine what those shared account connections were.
However, they announced a few days ago in Spain and other countries the implementation of a contentious method to determine who shared an account, and that it would, among other things, take into account the main connection via IP, which does not appear to be an exact method.
According to El Confidencial, many users have taken to social media to complain that Netflix is incorrectly identifying them in their primary place of residence, even placing them hundreds of kilometres away and in other provinces.
Fernando Maciá, for example, has taken to Twitter to complain that Netflix has placed him hundreds of kilometres away from his original home, where he has his main account.
There are numerous other examples.
There have been numerous reports of people being placed by Netflix by IP in cities they do not live in or have recently visited, which can be problematic if accounts begin to be automatically blocked.
Obviously, Netflix is testing, and it is unlikely that they will begin blocking accounts until they are certain that the method is working properly, but the method is currently not working.
This is because IP addresses do not provide exact addresses, and the only person who knows the relationship between the IP and the user’s real address is the operator, and Netflix does not have access to this data.
We’ll see how Netflix handles the controversial decision to block shared accounts in order to avoid losing many users along the way.
