People share passwords for their various streaming services all the time. Whether you personally take part in this practice or not is your own ethical grey area to manage, but it’s a common practice in the digital world: You trade me a spot in your Netflix family and I’ll give you my Foxtel access.
Sharing passwords, however, is fundamentally a bad idea. It’s still a bad idea even if you have a great, strong, unique password for each of your streaming services; it’s a terrible idea if you use the same password, or a similar password, for multiple accounts.
To get around this, DoNotPay has added a feature to its Chrome extension that allows you to share access to your favourite streaming services without coughing up your actual password. Instead, you’ll be sending your friend the cookie—via an encrypted connection—that your streaming service uses to keep you logged in (if I’m correct). As CEO Joshua Browder told VentureBeat:
DoNotPay does not store the cookies or have access to them. We use VGS [Very Good Security], which provides encryption and PCI II compliance and is trusted by many fintech companies. The cookies are also encrypted in transit and can only be seen by the people you are sharing them with.
Excited to introduce the @DoNotPayLaw Chrome extension!
– Share your favorite subscriptions with friends and family using just a link. No password required.
– Trade subscriptions with friends. “I will give you X if you give me Y.https://t.co/zxc6Ye9GZB
— Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1) March 9, 2020
If you’re comfortable with this process—and I’d only use this extension to share login sessions with friends I trust, rather than the internet at large—get started by installing the extension in your Chrome browser. Pull up a site for a subscription service, like Netflix, and click on the extension to log in to your DoNotPay account (or create a free one). You don’t have to give up your credit card information (for receiving money from DoNotPay’s other services) to share accounts, so don’t go through with that if it feels weird.
Head back to Netflix, click on the extension again, and you’ll see this window pop up:
Click on that “Generate a link” button to do just that, and you’ll see the following screen:
You can then email that link directly to a friend and change its privacy status to public (your friends can look up what services you’re sharing) or private (you have to share the link for anyone to know it exists). If you click on the “Links” tab, you’ll see every magical link you’ve generated:
When you share a link with a friend, they’ll have to give up their own phone number to DoNotPay in order to gain access to your streaming service. So, yes, this is a pretty clever marketing ploy by DoNotPay, and we only hope they treat this data with the utmost care. Given that their goal seems to be sticking it to the man and getting you as much cash and other services as you can (legally or somewhat-legally) get, I’m not that flustered. As for the streaming services, we’ll see how well they take this…
To answer your question more specifically, this is a security tool to help people share accounts with authorized users without giving up their password. All services allow you to share accounts, as shown by the “up to 4 streaming devices at the same time!”
— Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1) March 9, 2020
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