Spain has begun to suffer from the consequences of the expansion of measures to avoid shared accounts for the service of Netflix: location errors.
Different users in the country, one of the four to which these new terms and conditions have been expanded apart from Peru, Chile and Costa Rica, point out that. Netflix does not locate their devices or does so at very long distances, thus blocking their accounts or forcing them to overpay for ‘extra membership’.
Netflix bugs
People have been sharing on social networks like Twitter that the location by IP address service is locating them incorrectly.
The curious thing is that the same users report not having moved locations or logged in to different cities as to give rise to this problem.
Why is this happening?
According to El Confidencial, determining location by IP alone can be unreliable.
“The only one who knows the relationship between IP and customer address and its location is the communication operator that assigns you the IP,” explains Antoni Martínez Ballester, associate professor of Computer Science Studies at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). “This can be consulted by Telefónica, Orange or Vodafone. But it cannot be consulted by Netflix“.
In order for companies such as. Netflix can get the location of users that way, they turn to private company databases, but not all of these are accurate.
“An operator may report that all its addresses are in Barcelona, despite providing services in remote rural areas. When they consult the information, the generic answer will be that they are in Barcelona,” he adds.
While, in Peru, this has a value of 8 soles per extra member, that of Spain is 6 euros per month per person.
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