Anna Daniels
With kids quarantined inside with nothing to do but stream movies and shows for the foreseeable future, parents are naturally going to get stricter with what they can and can’t watch. But how many complaints do you think it took for Netflix to start rolling those stricter parental controls into its actual platform? We can’t know for sure, but it had to have been a fair few in a short amount of time, considering how fast Netflix is rolling out a new series of tools allowing parents to filter — and even remove — titles that their kids can see on the service.
The Verge reports that Netflix is expanding its parental control options with a new series of tools that allow parents to filter the content their kids see on the service, and even remove movies and shows entirely.
With these tools, parents can remove an individual TV series or movie by title so that it won’t appear at all on that profile account — essentially like a blacklist or “mute” option on social media sites. Parents can also filter out titles based on rating, making it possible to have only G-rated films on their kids’ profile accounts.
Other expanded parental control options include adding PINs to protect profiles, allowing parents to review a child’s viewing history, and disabling autoplay on TV shows to help restrict screen time.
“Choice and control have always been important for our members, especially parents,” Michelle Parsons, kids product manager at Netflix, wrote in a blog post. “We hope that these additional controls will help parents make the right choices for their families.”
All these tools are pretty intense parental controls, but I wonder how different it is from the kid-friendly profile that Netflix already offers. The kids profile shows “exclusively kid-friendly content, and have a character navigation bar that makes it easy for kids to find their favorite shows and movies,” according to Netflix, and keeps the titles mostly rated G as it is.
It’s unclear whether these new controls will only apply to kids profiles, or whether they can be exerted on regular Netflix profiles as well. If intended for teens or preteens, these measures already seem a bit extreme, but perhaps parents are just getting sick of the LEGO TV shows playing on repeat in quarantine.
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