AFAICT, if a Netflix account owner sets up a VPN for their household, then anyone sharing the account who routes their Netflix traffic through that VPN would appear to be accessing Netflix from that household’s WAN IP address.
Is anyone doing this? Is it really that simple or are there more challenges?
EDIT: We get it, you like torrenting. Let’s keep comments on topic folks.
Netflix’s restrictions are not based on IP address. That would be an incredibly unreliable way of determining a location
They’re looking at the network you’re connected to. Exactly what they’re looking for is not public
How can I spoof EVERYTHING to be identical in all locations using my openwrt routers ? Do they look at my GPS data, or the name and addresses of other wifi and bluetooth devices ? Do they check my traceroute between my device and their servers ?
You don’t have to spoof everything. If you setup a wireguard server on your router then, then VPN into that then you’ll be on the actual network and Netflix cannot tell the difference.
Netflix has come out and said they don’t use GPS. I cannot authoritatively say they don’t traceroute or use other signals, but the wireguard tunnel works so you can only assume they do not.
I was wondering because if they use wifi & bluetooth discovery, then a VPN isn’t going to help,. one phone will see a certain bunch of your neighbour’s SSIDs while another phone will see other. Also A-GPS is not technically GPS, it is cell tower triangulation, the name of your cell towers and in what quadrant they’re seeing your phone (that’s how they caught Mitnick).
Also the wireguard VPN acts as a L3 separation, so you still see on your L2 segment, different MACs and different addresses in the broadcast traffic.
I imagine that Netflix would use an heuristics based machine learning system, so while not one particular aspect would out you as part of a different household, an inventory of signals might make them suspect you “enough” that they start harassing you with 2 factor authentications invalidating your session cookies. Not exactly expulsing you from the service but just annoying enough that most will prefer to cough up a few more bucks for a separate account. And of course, as their needs to supplemental revenue increases, they’ll be able to tweedle your knobs until they get just the perfect amount of annoyance to convert “freeloaders” into paying customers rather than defectors or pirates.
I considered setting up a Pi for WireGuard at my mom’s house (her router doesn’t support VPN), so we could share subscriptions still, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and risk that they would start VPN detecting from the client: could just imagine them sending her emails about it that would confuse her lol
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Yes it works. It really is that simple!
Tell them to use a free streaming site. Here’s one of the best: https://hydrahd.io/
Stop working harder for the businesses taking your money.
no, but i do use a VPN to torrent whatever few movies worth watching that they shovel out
Yarhar and all that
No cause why would anyone pay for Netflix? Everything on there is available for free online.
Not using vpn but using mail filter fwd. Mails from netflix with codes are fwd to all using the shared account. So if you need to reactivate a device you request a device code and get it in the mail.
If you even get the option for the code. For some reason my TV will never do it.
Smart, thanks for the interesting idea.
EDIT: We get it, you like torrenting. Let’s keep comments on topic folks.
To be fair, you posted in the self-hosted community discussing an Issue for proprietary software.
To answer your question, which others have already done, yes your VPN tunnel will share the same IP as your household so long as it’s setup properly.
Just a stupid question - Is self-hosting (and this forum) only applies to open source products?
This is just my opinion but nope, not at all. There’s plenty of proprietary self-host software. Plex is self-host software and it gets talked about here despite being proprietary.
An issue which I aim to resolve using a self-hosted VPN.
I do live at 3 locations in 2 countries for work reasons and have a wireguard VPN server at my primary home that acts as a gateway for all my traffic, not only because of streaming but also because my bank locked me out for suspicious behavior before. The routers at locations 2 and 3 are sending all their traffic to my primary home.
No issues with this setup, I can only recommend it. I also have a centralized NAS this way and all my home assistant instances are interconnected.
What hardware do you use to avoid slowdowns?
I have 10 GBit Fiber :)
That’s a pretty good solution I suppose.
In all locations presumably? Do you know if it’s indistinguishable from you being at your main residence? Like are there any technical ways a service you’re connecting to could tell that you’re going through a VPN? (Just curious BTW!)
No one location has DSL and the other 5G. Both have around 200 Mbits but thats totally fine.
It’s completely indistinguishable from my main location and nobody can see I am using VPN.
In terms of bank, I recommend switching to one that won’t block you for travelling, like Revolut
Revolut effectively blocked me for using custom ROMs on my phones. Fuck them.
So do all banks, that’s what Play Integrity Fix is for.
(de-googled crDroid Android 15 user here).
My bank doesn’t.
I’ve done this. I have a Google TV Stick. If Netflix starts preventing people from opening their app when it detects a VPN (in Android), then you can do what I did and run the VPN on the routers themselves. In my case it’s ASUS routers on both ends, and they support Wireguard natively (GliNet are also really good for this as they support and run OpenWrt)
The benefit to doing it this way is that neither Netflix nor the Google TV itself are aware they’re on a VPN. The ASUS routers I use have a feature called VPN Fusion, where you can put different clients on or off of different VPN connections.
Edit: To clarify, I share with family. I’m not the account owner, but I’m one of the profiles in the account.
Every wifi device we own that’s connected to wifi and the Internet can be precisely located by the companies involved even when using a VPN.
If you have an Android phone you’ve probably noticed a prompt at some point asking for your permission to transmit precise location information and enable wifi scanning. Those wifi SSIDs and MAC addresses along with its GPS location is sent back to Google. The combination of all that information is almost as unique as a fingerprint. They can use that along with signal strength of each AP in the area to determine your device’s location with precision. (Google used to allow apps like Maps to be used with wifi scanning turned off, but no more.)
Your Google stick can’t tell it’s on a VPN directly, but even without GPS Google can still pinpoint its physical location using their database of SSIDs and MAC addresses, and if they want to they can determine you’re using a VPN by comparing that to the expected location of your IP address. There probably aren’t enough people doing this right now to make it worth the trouble to detect your VPN, but IMO it’s just a matter of time before they decide it is.
I also expect that Google sells that information to every company willing to pay for it, so almost every single wifi enabled device can be precisely located if it can transmit data to the Internet.
We live in a scary time.
Interesting info. I switched to grapheneos recently, which allows you to disable a lot of that stuff. Combining that with WG, should make a solid way to share
This never worked for me. It would always detect my VPN and alarm out. Even when I was logged in from my own country. If it was on, I was locked out.
I use a third party VPN without any issues (USA)
