I just spent a weekend in Cape Cod, and had some time to think while I was relatively unplugged. Since coming back, I’ve seen a lot of comments out there claiming that people are making too big a deal out of NetFlix removing profiles. I disagree - NetFlix has repeatedly shown themselves to be a bad company, and boycott may be the only rational response. At the very least, after observing the complete lack of professional ethics in those at NetFlix, I regret having given them my personal and financial information. And so I decided that here I should outline a little more thoroughly what’s wrong with what NetFlix has done.

UPDATE: NetFlix is now not getting rid of profiles. But they’re still evil.

As I noted before,

Since they first reported on this, Hacking NetFlix posted a much more thorough response from the company, in which it was revealed that the primary reason for this change is that they’ve been using bad software design. Apparently, the profiles system was a kludge in the first place, and they need to remove it to try to clean up some of the cruft and implement everything in a better way. They also hope to implement a multiple-queues feature that will work for those on 1-at-a-time plans (profiles, as they stand now, don’t.)

Somehow, it doesn’t make me feel better to know that the reason for this inconvenience to me is that NetFlix has crappy developers who use bad software design. Again, I’m not feeling good about giving my financial information to such people.

This situation was also handled very badly. If they had an alternative set up before they notified us of the change, or if they’d even had a solid plan and could explain how much better the new system is going to be, then people may have been satisfied. Here is how it should have gone:

1. Introduce new, better feature
2. Announce old feature deprecation
3. Painlessly migrate users to new system
4. Remove old feature

Here’s how they’re apparently doing it:

1. Announce old feature deprecation and the lack of any migration
2. Remove old feature
3. Lose tens of thousands of customers
4. Introduce new, better feature

Of course, NetFlix has announced that they don’t care about losing tens of thousands of customers, as they have 8 million to please. I don’t care how big you are - 80,000 people are a lot of people to impact adversely, and one should not trod roughshod over them. That is no way to treat your customers, and every other customer knows they could be next. How long will it be before we hear, “We’ve decided to get out of the DVD business - we’re getting more revenue from ‘watch it now’”?

And NetFlix is still promoting this feature to draw in customers, even though it is being discontinued.

But none of this is the main problem with the change. What people are most upset about, and rightly so, is losing data. NetFlix has a great deal of personal data in the form of rental history, queues, and ratings which is currently separate by profile. NetFlix’s plans are:

• Merge rental history from all profiles into the main account
• Delete secondary profiles’ queues
• Delete secondary profiles’ ratings

This will totally screw up the recommendation system. Different profiles can have different ratings which will generate different recommendations. At the urging of NetFlix, with the promise of better recommendations, many people spent a large amount of time rating movies, generating lots of data. Now instead of making good on their promises, NetFlix is simply deleting all of this data on secondary profiles. Mishandling data generated by users is an unforgivable offense on the part of an internet company, and is a troubling sign with respect to their lack of professional ethics.

This isn’t the first time NetFlix has shown their lack of concern for ethics. This has appeared before in their practices of throttling (Advertising unlimited dvd rentals then limiting your dvd rentals if you make use of the service), bait-and-switch (giving better service during the free trial period, largely due to throttling), lying about the quality of anime DVDs, and harassing critics.

And so we see that NetFlix has a complete lack of concern for professional ethics. They admit to creating bad software, they do not put their users first when making changes to their service, they mishandle users’ data, and they use unethical business practices. No one should ever again do business with NetFlix.