Sunday, February 19, 2023

I dropped Wild Things on someone else's Netflix viewing history

The AirBnB we stayed in this weekend has a couple smart TVs, a large one in the living room and one mounted on the wall near the ceiling in the bedroom. I used one each night, both to watch things on Netflix. (I was the only adult present, as I took the kids out of town for two nights to give my wife some alone time in our house for her birthday weekend. We went to Gumbuya World, an amusement park that has rides, waterslides and a zoo, though we only did the first two.)

The one in the living room appealed to me because of its size, but not its convenience. It's one of those TVs that has access to all the apps you could possibly want, with none of them logged in. That means you could either log in with your own information or not use them at all. So I did log in with our Netflix username and password in order to watch the romantic comedy The Incredible Jessica James, which was a perfect little slice of light, under-90-minute viewing for a Friday night.

It was on Saturday night that I realized I had a problem by having logged in with our details on the other TV. The TV is smart -- it's right there in the name -- so it remembers those preferences. It does not require us to keep logging in each time.

I figured this out, of course, because someone was indeed logged in on the TV in the bedroom, though it didn't seem like the owners' account. Or at the very least, if it did belong to the owners, they had been inconsistent with their application of their login, only putting it on one of the two TVs in the cottage.

In any case, the profiles on this Netflix account did not match what I knew to be the name of the guy I had been in touch with regarding the booking, Brian. These profiles belonged to Katherina, Steven, Harrison and Nixon, the last two of which were children.

Though something was a bit goofy with the settings. You know how Netflix goes into screen saver mode and shows you a bunch of slides of current offerings? I tend to get mesmerized by this and might sit there just watching it for ten minutes, playing little games like trying to guess the title before it appears on screen. Well, this particular screen saver mode was showing everything from the Little Rascals movie, presumably a selection that would only come up on a kids profile, to Anaconda, a movie where people get eaten by a large South American snake. (Incidentally, the last day to watch The Little Rascals on Netflix is February 28th. I better get on that.)

Seeing this account logged in made me realize that we could be the next account still logged in when the next people who stay at this house get here, possibly as soon as Sunday night. So I better get us logged off the living room TV.

At first I was unsure how to do this. The app version on the smart TV does not include an option for logging out, or not one that I could easily see anyway. You can exit Netflix, but of course once you get back in, it's still you.

I did ultimately figure out how to remotely log out using the website, though at first it was ambiguous which session needed to be logged out, because its geographical location did not match the geographical location where we were. But before we left, our profiles were indeed safe from the next guests.

I cannot say the same for Katherina, Steven, Harrison and Nixon.

Though it didn't occur to me until after I started watching Wild Things on Saturday night that I might be creating a problem for someone.

I think it was the Katherina profile I used to watch the steamy 1998 Florida noir, which has more double crosses than a whole convent of nuns. (When they make that sign in front of their chests, is it considered a "double cross"? It's a stretch.) But I'm not sure if that makes the situation better or worse.

In theory, I realized too late, Katherina or Steven would see the title appearing on their recently watched movies, and have no idea how it got there -- except that the other might have watched it surreptitiously and then later denied doing so. Just going on heteronormative assumptions here, Steven might have snuck in a peak at illicit Denise Richards boobs, but put it on his wife's profile to "hide" the "crime." Alternatively, if Katherina were have doubts about her sexuality and Steven suspected them, it might only push that conversation further into uncomfortable places.

I supposed I could delete the movie from their viewing history, but I think this is another thing that can only be done from a computer, not from an app. So Katherina and Steven (and Harrison and Nixon) may be stuck with my viewing of Wild Things. (And let's not dismiss the possibility that Harrison or Nixon are reaching an age when they are curious about the opposite sex, or well past that age, and it might look like they hacked into a parent's account to watch some illicit Denise Richards boobs.)

I say it didn't occur to me until after the fact that I could be causing a problem for this other family, but I can't deny that I thought two other things simultaneously, failing only in putting two and two together. Those things were 1) being out of town is a perfect time to watch some illicit Denise Richards boobs, 2) it being someone else's Netflix account means there will be no record of it that will come back to bite me.

Of course, every time I confess something like this on my blog, it means I'm obviously not that interested in keeping it a secret. Anyone who wants to come here and read this will know that I watched some illicit Denise Richards boobs on Saturday night. But will I tell my wife what I watched on Saturday night, when she was watching Everything Everywhere All at Once back at our hourse? Probably not.

Though it didn't honestly occur to me until after the fact that my viewing might not be causing a problem for me, but it could be causing a problem for someone else.

Well, there wasn't any way around it assuming I wanted the novelty of watching a movie in bed, something I never do. If I couldn't log my own account out in the living room using the app, I certainly couldn't log out theirs. 

In truth, Wild Things is a lot more tame than I remembered. It only actually has two nudes scenes -- or only two female nude scenes anyway. The other female nude scene belongs to Theresa Russell in a rather explicit sex scene, but then you also get to see Kevin Bacon's schlong, which I remembered. So Katherina could have been watching not for secret lesbian reasons, but to get a two-second glimpse of Bacon dick. 

And I didn't actually watch it for prurient reasons, per se. It took a fair amount of scrolling before I finally found it. In fact, my first instinct was to watch The Flintstones, if you can believe it. The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas was, like The Little Rascals, another movie disappearing from Netflix on February 28th, as the screen saver showed me. I thought "Hey, I never saw the first one of those, maybe this would be a good opportunity." But Netflix wasn't carrying it, and just jumping straight to the sequel somehow seemed wrong. I mean, I'd be totally lost.

But when Wild Things did come up, I confirmed it pretty quickly as the choice. For one, I've started 2023 with a number of repeat viewings of movies from that vintage (Pi, Orgazmo, The Sixth Sense). Nineteen ninety-eight is 25 years ago, which makes now a useful round number of years later to reconsider those films. Secondly, it was always considered rather "wild" -- it's right there in the title -- and I wanted to see how much that held up, given the way it got gums flapping back in the day. Being able to watch it without my wife walking into the living room and wondering aloud why I was watching it was only really the third consideration.

As for Katherina, Steven, Harrison and Nixon ... good luck sorting out the issues that illicit Denise Richards boobs may have caused you.

And if this is just the owners' account but with weird dummy names thrown in for misdirection, well, now they think I'm some perv I guess.

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