Is Using Someone Else’s Streaming Account a “Money-Saving Lie?”

We’ve written before about the financial white lies people tell in order to save cash, such as misrepresenting their child’s age to get lower ticket prices.

A new study from NerdWallet clarifies just how much we are willing to lie when it comes to financial gain—and asks us to consider whether we consider these lies “acceptable.”

I’m not surprised that people regularly lie about their income, their mileage, and so on—but I’m a little surprised that NerdWallet considers “using someone else’s Netflix, Amazon Prime or other paid account” to be a financial lie.

I checked Amazon Prime’s terms of service, and the only thing I found related to “using someone else’s account” was this caveat:

You may not transfer or assign your Prime membership or any Prime benefits, including promotion codes for Prime memberships or benefits, except as allowed in these terms.

Okay, I can’t transfer my Prime membership, but I can totally go to a friend’s house and say “wait, if we log in to my Amazon account we can watch this movie for free on Prime,” right? That’s not a financial lie.

HBO Now’s terms of service are a bit more strict:

Once you have created a Registered Account, subject to availability, you may be given the option to add authorized users tied to your Registered Account (the “Authorized User(s)”). Authorized Users should be limited to members of your immediate household only.

I think there are a lot of us using the term “immediate household” loosely, but we’re also the people who might not have traditional households and have instead built our own so-called “urban families.”

I mean, if you put all of our apartments together it might count as a small house! And we eat dinner together at least as often as a so-called “traditional family” does! (Sharing food photos with each other counts.) We take each other to the airport, look out for each other when we’re sick, and do just about everything except live under the same roof—which we’ve kind of talked about, but only as a joke, like “wouldn’t it be great if we bought a huge old farmhouse somewhere,” we’re not seriously considering this, even though it would be a pretty cool thing to do.

But that’s just me trying to justify what NerdWallet considers a “money-saving lie.”

So: what do you think about these lies? Are they acceptable? Unacceptable? Is it acceptable to share a Netflix password but not acceptable to lie about under-the-table income? Should the definition of household be expanded to include urban families? Or should everyone just buy their own Netflix and HBO Now?

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