One of the effects of the corona virus at least here in Kenya has been to spent most of the time with our kids at home. Schools have closed and we don’t get to go to work, instead we’ve grown accustomed to working from home, but for those who have unlimited home internet with active Netflix accounts are presented with an additional challenge to control the content consumed by their kids on Netflix.
Netflix hasn’t so far had a credible reputation when it comes to features available for parental control. Back in 2018, the streaming giant heeded to calls from many parents and added a feature to put a PIN protection on user’s accounts but their approach was lackluster at best. The parental control feature was applied to the entire account affecting all profiles on that account and legal adults had to constantly unlock their profiles each time they wanted to stream something.
At the moment, this tedious exercise has now been improvised at least, the streaming giant has rolled out several parental control features; this time, allowing the ability to lock individual profiles with a PIN and keeping kids away from adult shows.
Advantages of adding a parental PIN protection on your Netflix account
Including the need to have a valid PIN on your Netflix account as a parental control measure has two important advantages. first, it will stop the Netflix’s streaming platform’s algorithm from recommending content based on someone else’s viewing choices in case you’re all using the same profile, and secondly, you’ll be able to pick up where you left off if you’ve left watching an episode or movie midway.
How to add a parental PIN security feature to your Netflix profile
Setting up a PIN for your Netflix profiles is straight forward, but you’ll need to go through a few steps to get it done. There’s no specific requirements except that this only works while using a web browser. You cannot achieve this through the mobile app (Android or iOS), at least for now.
You will also need to remember your account password to get this done. To set up a PIN:
- Log into your Netflix account on a web browser using a computer or tablet of whichever
- Secondly Select the profile you want to lock down, in this case you might want to lock those profiles meant for adults
- Click on ‘Account’ from the dropdown menu under the profile in the top right-hand corner
- Scroll down to the Profile & Parental Controls section then proceed to select the appropriate profile
- Click ‘Change‘ next to ‘Profile Lock’, you should be redirected to a different page
- Put your Netflix account password
- Then Check the ‘Lock this profile by creating a 4-digit pin’ box
- Enter your desired PIN and save
After putting a PIN, you can then proceed to apply Fine filters for age-inappropriate content based on country ratings. This will remove TV shows and films individually from the Netflix Kids experience – so your smaller kid won’t accidentally watch something meant for older kids.