Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing also ended one of my family’s favorite pastimes

By James On Aug 6, 2023

Last May, Netflix scrapped its password-sharing policy and restricted accounts to individual households. The move was widely criticized for many practical reasonsbut for me, the policy marked the end of one of the most cherished ways I bonded with my sister: aggressively changing our family’s icons without prior approval.

Today my family is spread over two continents and four cities. My sister is in the Netherlands, my brother is studying and my parents have the fort in Florida. And in 2022, when we all started to spread out, we still shared a Netflix account. Netflix’s changes made me move away from it earlier this year, and now every time I log into my new account I’m met with a pang of sadness at not being greeted by the small lineup of my family’s icons .

Netflix’s icon selection primarily pulls from its original library, with image options ranging from Squid game Unpleasant Stranger things Unpleasant The Boss Baby: back to work. But the real benefit is that, if you share an account with more than one person, you can also freely change their icons without any additional input. For years we all just used our default icons. Then one day I chose chaos.

The Great Icon Swap started during the first summer I had a job and didn’t spend the school holidays with my family. They were abroad, so in my loneliness I changed everyone’s icons (except my father’s; the unspoken rule of this game was that his automatically generated, enthusiastically smiling icon should never change). Later, without confirmation, my sister changed the icons again. The war started.

The first blow in the battle

Photo courtesy of Tatiana Radulovic

A Netflix login screen with a standard smiley, Count Olaf, Mr. Poe, Okja and a cartoon cat — …and the immediate counterattack

Most of the time, changing icons was a surprise when found the next time we logged in. We also tended to skew what we were watching (or knew the other person was watching). Sometimes we were just mean about it, purposefully choosing the most annoying or weird character; I once made the creepy mask for my sister Money robberywhich scared her, so she took revenge on me by making one of the monstrous Skeksis dolls out of me Dark crystal. The hormone sample out Big mouth was an easy universal choice for primed (loving) bullying.

None of my other family members joined the game, mainly because my parents didn’t realize this was something that could be done (and my little brother was #toocool for surrendering). Occasionally, however, my mother would notice when we changed her icon and point it out to us.

A text conversation from mama who — She tried

The last time we changed our icons was last summer. Fresh from the most recent season of The Umbrella Academy, we agreed on which characters most represented our personalities. It helped that all of the Hargreeves siblings are kind of crappy in their own way, so no one could really get mad. I resigned myself to Luther, the obedient eldest child, as she took on Klaus, the chaotic free spirit (and we gave our too-smart little brother Five).

Everything was going well on Radulovic’s Netflix account until I started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender and got a message telling me to register my account as home base or get kicked off. I accepted my fate. All my years of watching shows are now over (I think there is a way to pass on history, but I refuse to do it out of sadness); all my icon swap history has been deleted. Now when my family logs in, they see Luther Hargreeves’ face staring at them with my name underneath, but it’s an empty shell, one that hasn’t completed the show she was in the middle of before Netflix kicked her out.

A Netflix login screen with a default icon, Klaus from The Umbrella Academy, Luther from The Umbrella Academy, a cute bunny, and Five from The Umbrella Academy. — Look at the aforementioned “cute friend”

Over there is an option to pay for password sharing, but asking my parents to do that for three kids seems excessive (and yes, I could pay for it monthly, but I don’t think they know how Venmo works). So I took full responsibility with my own account. It’s a lonely page with just my icon (and the one my mom accidentally made when I made it log into her laptop and she thought all she had to do to log into her own account was create one with the text “Mama”). Only I ever change my picture. It’s bittersweet.

I miss the chaotic way of bonding with my sister. I miss my mother’s stunned reactions when we made her a cute bunny. I miss this strangely specific way of interacting through a streaming account, this method of sharing what we watched and what characters we identified with (or saw in each other). I think we’ll all leave the nest eventually, but I’ve always hoped I could stay a little longer in the virtual.