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

polygon.com:

This past May, Netflix axed its password sharing policy, limiting accounts to individual households. The move was widely criticized for many practical reasons, but for me, the policy meant the end of one of the most treasured ways I bonded with my sister: aggressively changing our family’s icons without prior approval.

These days, my family is scattered across two continents and four cities. My sister is off in the Netherlands, my brother is in college, and my parents hold the fort in Florida. And in 2022, when we all began to spread out, we were still sharing a Netflix account. Thanks to Netflix’s changes, I got booted off it earlier this year, and now every time I log in to my new account, I am hit with a pang of sadness because I’m not greeted by the little lineup of my family’s icons.

Netflix’s icon selection pulls mostly from its original library, with image options ranging from Squid Game to Stranger Things to The Boss Baby: Back in Business. But the real win 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 began during the first summer I had a job and didn’t spend a school break with my family. They were abroad, so in my loneliness, I changed everyone’s icons (except for my dad’s; the unspoken rule of this little game was that his auto-generated, enthusiastically smiling icon was to never be changed). Then later, without acknowledgement, my sister changed the icons again. The war began.

Usually, the changing of icons was a surprise to be found the next time we each logged in. We also tended to skew toward whatever we were watching (or knew