In the summer of 2014, Sean Maloney lucked into some valuable information. He was home from college, staying with his family in Beloit, Wisconsin, and he had recently installed a new Samsung Smart TV in his family’s basement living room. One night, Maloney’s younger brother’s friend logged into Netflix on the device using his stepmom’s account. For nearly a decade after, Maloney used this login—that is, his little brother’s friend’s stepmom’s login—to stream hit shows like The Office, New Girl, and Stranger Things without paying a dime.
“Basically once a week, I thought I was getting the boot,” the 29-year-old Maloney said. “All it would’ve taken was a friendship or a marriage ending, and I guess it just never happened.”
Then, about two weeks ago, following Netflix’s late-May warning that it would begin cracking down on interlopers, Maloney opened the app and realized he’d been logged out. It was, in his words, a “devastating day.”
“I was legitimately bummed,” Maloney said. “And not just ’cause I lost a login. It was a fun running joke. At the friend’s wedding this year when I gave them their gift, I even left a note saying it was payback for a decade of Netflix mooching.”
Maloney and his lost login are early casualties of Netflix’s great piggybacker purge and a sign that the halcyon days of free streaming access are numbered. Just two weeks after Netflix began limiting sharing privileges to people within a single household, a television analytics company called Antenna published data showing that the streaming giant experienced its four best days of user sign-ups since Antenna started tracking Netflix’s sign-ups four years ago. Since the new sharing policy went into effect on May 23, Netflix’s stock price has risen about 23 percent.
The bump is great news for Netflix, which needed to get creative after it posted its first subscriber loss in a decade last spring. But it’s bad news for the many people who caught a free ride at the dawn of the streaming wars. If Netflix is able to add hundreds of thousands of new subscribers and boost its stock price by cracking down on password sharing, what’s to stop other streaming services—which face uncertainty amid slowing subscriber growth and the ongoing writers strike—from following Netflix’s lead?
Considering that these aging tech companies built their customer bases by neglecting their bottom lines, this shift was to be expected. Uber leaned on venture capital to offer huge discounts on rides. Airbnb did the same to keep rental fees low. Netflix and its competitors allowed—even encouraged—widespread password sharing. But as investors have put pressure on tech darlings to finally become profitable, companies have upped their rates and slashed their perks. And now it’s the streaming industry’s turn to collect on all the goodwill it has handed out over the years.
Maybe other services like Hulu, Max, and Disney+ will follow suit in a few months. Maybe in a few years. But make no mistake, the purge is coming. Its earliest victims are experiencing whiplash, confronting what these changes mean for their wallets, viewing habits, and the connections they’ve built upon a shared password. As Emma Schwartz, a New York–based Netflix subscriber put it: “It’s a reckoning of sorts.”
As long as passwords have been used to gatekeep our digital services, they’ve been traded around like good gossip. Millennials were primed to pick up the habit due to their early access to tech. Most digital natives’ first computers were communal: accessed in college labs, public libraries, or the family living room. In these spaces, they shared hardware and the experiences that the internet unlocked, trawling through AOL chat rooms after school and exploiting the weak passwords and naivete of their elders. “My first dial-up connection at home used credentials cribbed from the public library,” said Ellie, who, like many of the people I spoke to for this story, preferred to remain partially anonymous. “The library normally used the same credentials on a half dozen phone lines concurrently. So, ‘What’s one more?’ I figured.”
Eventually, millennials were baptized in the free-flowing content fountains of Napster, imbued with an entitlement to music that enraged an industry and also forced it to transform. When that gravy train came to an abrupt stop, listeners hopped on the next one and learned how to torrent. By the late aughts, millions of people were pirating newly released albums, blockbuster movies, and popular network television shows.
Netflix launched its digital streaming service in 2007 with the aim to reshape the way viewers accessed content. And to a certain extent, it succeeded: Its subscribers now enjoy on-demand access at a relatively affordable price. But old habits die hard, and the quest for free content took on yet another form: widespread password sharing. According to a survey last year by Parks Associates, 40 percent of U.S. households share passwords or use shared passwords. And a 2016 poll by LastPass found that viewers between the ages of 18 and 29 are most likely to swap logins. Young people, in particular, have created a culture of digital intimacy, though sometimes they gain access to their favorite shows, sports, and movies by more serendipitous means.
“In college my freshman year, I did not have a Netflix account, and neither did my roommate,” Jake Mussman, a 26-year-old financial analyst from Minneapolis, said. “My roommate vowed to fix that. Soon after, he texted me that he ‘needed the room.’”
When Mussman returned to his dorm, his roommate presented him with a gift: a Netflix login on Mussman’s Xbox.
“I never met the account holder, and, to my knowledge, my roommate never saw them again.”
In other cases, knowledge of more illicit login information was traded between friends like the answers to a notoriously hard chemistry exam. Kennelly, a former colleague of mine from New York, began searching for a login for Major League Baseball’s livestreaming service in the fall of 2009. Kennelly wanted to watch the Yankees and inadvertently stumbled into a baseball gold mine.
“A friend of a friend says what you should do is type in ‘philadelphia.phillies’ at MLB.TV, and then, for the password, just use ‘philadelphia.phillies,’” Kennelly said.
To their disbelief, it worked. Not only that, but their ability to watch games wasn’t limited by location the way a standard account might be.
“The assumption was these accounts were set up for every team with these default passwords so that scouts could use them while they were on the road,” Kennelly said. “And the Phillies had not changed their default password.”
They used the login to watch every remaining Yankees game that season, including the team’s World Series victory over—that’s right—the Phillies. The following year, Kennelly tried to do it again, only to realize the account owner had wised up about their scheme.
“So then it became a little game of infosec,” Kennelly said. “Like, what MLB teams had the worst security protocols? Then just guessing the password ‘city.team name’ to see what would work. And the team that took the longest to figure this out and change their default password was the San Diego Padres.”
For those who can afford to pay for a streaming service or three, sharing logins is less an act of intelligence collection and more a standard friend favor, the online equivalent of giving someone a ride to a party. It can function as a vote of confidence in a new relationship or serve as reassurance for a connection that has grown more distant. “It’s a trust thing,” Andrew Marino, a 33-year-old podcast producer who is especially liberal with account sharing, told me. “Like, ‘Oh yeah, I still have this person’s password. They still let me log in to their streaming service without me having to pay them.’ That’s a cool little digital fist bump.”
The act of password sharing requires two roles. In the process of reporting this story, I’ve come to think of them as whales and barnacles. Whales carry the weight of the monthly fee required to use a streaming service, and barnacles attach, sometimes in clusters, to hitch a free ride. Given that subscribing to every major streaming service would cost upward of $400 a month, most people I spoke to embraced both roles for mutual benefit. Jacob, a 32-year-old college administrator based in Brooklyn, says he has a group of around six friends nicknamed “Them Pals” who all function as a single streaming unit, sharing add-on accounts and swapping passwords via group chat.
“We have an entire shadow network within these friends,” Jacob said. “The couple who gives us HBO Max access uses my Netflix, Paramount Plus, and Peacock. I also use their Apple TV and Hulu.”
Even if everyone is willing to do their part in a saturated market, different personalities gravitate toward different roles. The whales are fiscally responsible rule followers who either prefer structure or can’t deal with the rigmarole of tracking down a login. One friend from Miami who works in medicine told me that she pays for everything “because my dad always told me I need to be an independent woman.” Classic whale talk. On the flip side, barnacles may or may not be able to afford to pay, but they think of password sharing like a sport. Landing a really obscure login is—to quote the now-defunct podcast Why’d You Push That Button?—like “a badge of honor.”
“It’s fun to be involved in a little scheme to take money away from corporations,” Jacob, of the “Them Pals” shadow network, told me. Without a doubt, the words of a barnacle.
Within the culture of password sharing, barnacles don’t necessarily have a parasitic relationship with whales. Consider the intruder who appeared on my college friend’s Netflix account about a year ago. “I have no idea who they are,” he said. “They created a separate profile called ‘EE’ and seem to like reality television and foreign documentaries.” The squatter doesn’t appear to be doing any harm, so my friend has allowed them to stay. “They took a calculated risk, so I gotta respect that,” he said. “In a strange way, it was really courteous. They have their algorithm; I have mine.”
In the best-case scenario, the whale-barnacle relationship is symbiotic: A subscriber shares their password so that they have someone with whom they can talk about their latest obsession. Jacob of “Them Pals” says he feels “sentimental” about how intertwined his streaming habits have become with those of the people he shares his accounts with. Occasionally, his Peacock account has warned him that too many people are using the service at once, which prompted him to discover that more of his friends were getting into soccer—a net positive in his mind.
“That’s a fun little marker to know their interest is growing in something that I care about,” he said. “It’s nice to see other people on the profile working through a show you love. It’s a reason to reach out to somebody, an occasion for connection.”
Just as intimate connections can be built from a shared login, they can also be dissolved because of one. People might begin a relationship by Netflix and chilling, only to endure a tug-of-war for password access when things fall apart. Lingering streaming accounts can often prolong the pain of a breakup. A friend of mine in New York recalls lurking on the HBO Max account of an ex-partner so she could watch The Great Pottery Throw Down. Whenever she logged in, she’d see the latest show her ex was watching and would judge his taste accordingly. It went on for about a year, until one day, she tried to log in and realized he’d changed the password.
“I did feel like it was the nail in the coffin for us even having a friendship,” she said. “Like, he was such a dick he couldn’t just let me watch Throw Down.”
In the case of personal loss, the remaining accounts of those who’ve passed away can be a rude reminder of their absence. Emma Schwartz, a documentary producer based in New York, says that around the time Netflix implemented its new password-sharing policy, her family was asked to authenticate their account with a code that went to her deceased mother’s phone. It was a stinging, unexpected reminder that their lives had forever shifted.
“It was real sobering,” Schwartz said. “Like, Mom’s dead. Time to grow up and get my own Netflix login.”
Schwartz’s experience encapsulates why so many viewers are attached to their shared logins. They’re grooves in our vast online footprint, evidence that we’re not individual “users” so much as members of a constantly shifting community. Amid the Netflix sweep, people are processing the loss of a type of digital intimacy that they may have never even realized existed.
“When someone gives me their password, I feel good about that,” Marino, the podcast producer, said. “That’s like a human connection. But if you don’t have that, if you lose that kind of bond with someone, it’s like: Aw man. It’s happened.”
Until the next work-around arrives, subscribers will simply be left to Netflix and mourn.
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