New Netflix Update Offers Detailed Parental Controls

For Netflix viewers tasked with managing their family’s entire account, it can be difficult to find the right balance when keeping tabs on what their children are watching. Now, Julia Alexander at The Verge reports that the streaming service is releasing updated parents controls.

What does that translate into? A more granular ability to edit what children are watching on a particular account.

Alexander neatly summarizes the forthcoming features here:

If a movie like The Matrix is listed as inappropriate for a child user, it won’t appear at all on that profile account. Netflix is also making it so that parents can filter out titles based on the rating. If they want to keep everything G-rating friendly, Netflix’s new tool will now make that possible.

The new features will allow parents to see what their children have been watching. Users will also be able to add personal identification numbers to keep their profiles protected — so, presumably, some wouldn’t be able to log in and watch inappropriate programming.

The Verge reports that these changes are now live. “Everyone can now add these new, improved controls to their profile by going to account settings on our mobile or laptop,” wrote Netflix’s Kids Project Manager Michelle Parsons in an announcement posted on Tuesday.

Don’t forget that there’s another, more analogue way to keep tabs on what your children are watching while you’re all locked down in quarantine together: actually paying attention to them.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…