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Can I have my other households VPN to my local network to bypass this?


Possibly, but it seems like this this would be pretty easy to detect.

First, they should already know who has been sharing accounts. You haven't been having other households VPN to your local network for the past 5 years for Netflix. That gives them a great starting point.

They can look at SSIDs and not just your SSID, but all the SSIDs that your device is seeing. Even within a household, not all the SSIDs will be the same from room to room. For most people, there will be some overlap. Sure, maybe you live in a rural area and you're the only SSID around. For most people, it'll be hard to fake this.

Even if you make all the SSIDs look similar, have you dealt with your BSSIDs? BSSIDs can be used to geolocate most people pretty well. Almost no one has opted out of the big WiFi geolocation databases (or even knows they can).

Maybe you could have them VPN into your local network, but they could still use WiFi and other information to see that the connection is actually in a different location. Plus, as I noted, they should already know who has been connecting from multiple locations for years.


I'm surprised that Apple allows apps on its devices to spy on SSIDs. Kinda not very privacy.

Maybe we all should change our SSIDs to "FBI Surveillance Van#1".


This entire plan immediately falls over as soon as someone uses an ethernet cable.


Not if they’re looking at SSID.

But if that’s really the case you can just use the same SSID on both places, and maybe use the same IP address space and router MAC. If they’re fingerprinting the home network that should do pretty good?


Ha! We used to live with my in-laws and when moving out I setup my SSID to be the same as theirs because who wants to re-authenticate an unreasonably large number of wireless devices?


I don't think they have SSID on most devices.


Fair point. Maybe the client and server can identify the last hop on the internal network and call that the local network's gateway.


If you're using Netflix through a browser, they wouldn't have access to the SSID.


I still watch netflix over wired devices.


Possibly, unless they’re also monitoring latency to player.


I was going to write "Why not have them ssh directly into your tv instead?" as a joke, but now I kind of wonder if that would actually work...


Yeah.




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