Disney Plus begins crackdown against password sharing

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 183 points –
Disney Plus begins crackdown against password sharing
techspot.com
36

I regret that I canceled already due to the October '23 price doubling, so I can no long illustrate my displeasure at this bullshit.

Back to the pirate life I guess.

Litterally this. I won't (and most people won't) feel morally wrong once I stop paying for Disney's content.

I mean if you were sharing someone's password, wouldn't you already not be paying? If you were paying for an account, you would have your own password so this would not be an issue.

I'm not pointing this out to be "pro Disney" because I couldn't give a half-shit there, but I always have to remind people that password sharing is bad security and shouldn't be done.

Some legit customers are fucked by the anti-password sharing methods some companies have used. Hulu, for instance, locks you out of live TV service if your IP address changes more than 4 times in a year. My ISP goes down a couple times a week, and changes my IP address every time. Every 4th time, I need to call Hulu and inform them that I, in fact, have not relocated my television, and it remains bolted to the wall. My ISP wants $40/month for a static IP address, so it's in their best interest to keep changing my IP address as often as possible.

The Netflix one screwed me... I go to hospital 3 times a week for 5 hours of dialysis. But Netflix viewed that as a second household and wanted me to pay for a second account to use my own account in 2 locations

Now I pay for zero accounts and still get any Netflix shows I want through alternative methods

Wait...How does Netflix treat it if someone travels for a week? I thought you only had to "check-in" at the "home" location every 30 days or something like that.

That's what they changed it to after I had already left... At first they only gave you 2 weeks at other locations for the year

Whaaat? 2 weeks per year? It wouldn't have affected me, but how would traveling customers keep watching legitimately?

Well that's another reason I'm glad I didn't go with Hulu with Live TV. The main reason being they solely rely on IP geolocation from what I can tell, which is generally trash. With YouTube TV if the location is incorrect at least I have the option of logging in to verify my actual location using my phone.

It doesn't seem to be based on geolocation from what I can tell. My subnet hasn't changed in a few years, just the last octet of my IP address. The geolocation when looked up has remained the same the entire time. If my IP address changes from x.x.x.23 to x.x.x.24, they consider it a "home location change".

The initial mapping of the local channels seemed to be when I did a trial. Despite having to put in my home address I was getting local channels from a TV market about 150mi away (coincidentally where my IP incorrectly geolocates to about half the time) even though I know other people that have used it and get our correct local channels.

I don't use Hulu live TV, so I don't know if the local channels are mapped correctly. They should be, as the geo IP for our address is in the correct county.

I have 2 homes, I’m not paying for Hulu twice.

Haha let me play the world's smallest violin for your sad situation there.

I have only one home, but I actually did pay for Hulu twice by accident when I realized that 2 of us had an active account. Canceled the extra one immediately so I'm only paying for one. But it was only about $8 per month for a few months, so I didn't quite starve.

I mean that situation describes almost any student in higher education, along with people in long term relationships who are yet to move in together - frankly those two cases more than likely make up the majority of people with two homes

As long as you segregate credentials and whichever service you’re sharing doesn’t expose any critical data like cc info what’s the risk?

That's the thing, it's usually just the one set of credentials and it has access to everything. Although to be fair they don't store the actual CC details anymore, just bank tokens.

Then take on yourself to help educate whoever doesn’t create a specific set of credentials to share accounts… But as we said back then - sharing is caring.

Reinforcing bad habits

What bad habit? Proving entertainment to your loved ones on the house? Because as long as the account is created specifically for the purpose of being shared there’s absolutely no bad habit in that…Being generous is considered cool no?

Turns out most were seemingly glad to comply when Netflix pulled that bs so I'll be legitimately shocked if most major streaming services don't follow suit within the next few months. I'm glad my seafaring ass hasn't had to deal with that kind of annoyance in years lol.

I don't share my password but Disney+ is the one streamer my wife hasn't let me cancel. Would happily leverage even the slightest inconvenience to bolster my argument and ditch the mouse. Make my day, Mickey.

Are they also starting a crackdown on people just having a password? It seems like every few weeks I have to go through the password recovery process because it thinks my password is wrong. So I set it back to what I had saved, rinse and repeat.

Are you sure your account isn't comprimised? Change it to something other than what it used to be and see if it happens again.

Pretty sure I've tried both ways. I'm using a unique password and I don't see any other indications of the account being compromised. I think Disney just sucks at IT.

I see. It's just that I've had disney plus for many years and ive never had to change the password. Ever. I also work in IT and i believe its far more likely theres an issue at your end.

When you say its a unique password, what do you mean by that? Because if someone else knows the password then it doesnt matter if its unique. Also if they are resetting it then its more likely that they have access to your email account that is linked to disney.

I would have a look at a site like https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to see if your accounts have been comprimised.

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So what exactly constitutes this crackdown? Do they tie the login to your phone's MAC address?