Share Accounts Without Disclosing Passwords Using DoNotPay
People are constantly exchanging passwords for various streaming services. Whether you personally take part in this practice or not, this is your gray area of ethics to be managed, but it is a common practice in the digital world: you change places in your Netflix family and I will give you access to Hulu.
However, exchanging passwords is a bad idea. It’s still a bad idea, even if you have a great, strong and unique password for each of your streaming services; This is 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 favorite streaming services without forgetting your actual password. Instead, you’ll send your friend a cookie – over an encrypted connection – that your streaming service uses to save your login (if I’m right). As CEO Joshua Browder told VentureBeat :
DoNotPay does not store or access cookies. We use VGS [Very Good Security], which provides encryption and PCI II compliance and is trusted by many fintech companies. Cookies are also transmitted encrypted and can only be seen by the people you share them with.
If you enjoy this process – and I would only use this extension to share login sessions with friends I trust, not on the Internet in general – start by installing the extension in your Chrome browser. Open a site with a subscription service like Netflix and click the extension to sign in to your DoNotPay account (or create a free one ). You don’t need to share your credit card information (to receive money from other DoNotPay services) to share accounts, so don’t if you find it odd.
Go back to Netflix, click on the extension again and you will see a popup:
Click the Create Link button to do this and you will see the following screen:
You can then email this link directly to a friend and change its privacy status to public (your friends can find out which services you use) or private (you must share the link so anyone knows it exists). If you click on the Links tab, you will see every magic link you create:
When you share the link with a friend, they will have to provide DoNotPay with their phone number in order to access your streaming service. So yes, this is a pretty clever marketing ploy by DoNotPay and we just hope they treat this data with the utmost care. Given that their goal seems to be to put this on a man and provide you with as much money and other services as you can (legally or somewhat legally) get, I’m not that excited. As far as streaming services go, let’s see how well they take it …