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.
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