Protecting Netflix Viewing Privacy at Scale

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The Netflix tech blog has a post explaining how the company has added a new layer of protection to its video streaming for its for 80+ million customers. According to the blog post, by the end of 2016, the company will be adding TLS encryption on its Open Connect servers without impacting efficiency.

In the modern internet world, we have to focus not only on efficiency, but also security. There are many state-of-the-art security mechanisms in place at Netflix, including Transport Level Security (TLS) encryption of customer information, search queries, and other confidential data. We have always relied on pre-encoded Digital Rights Management (DRM) to secure our video streams. Over the past year, we’ve begun to use Secure HTTP (HTTP over TLS or HTTPS) to encrypt the transport of the video content as well. This helps protect member privacy, particularly when the network is insecure - ensuring that our members are safe from eavesdropping by anyone who might want to record their viewing habits.
 
Since Netflix has an official no-porn policy, what might they be showing that I wouldn't want others to know that I am viewing?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for more privacy and I approve of this increase in privacy security. I'm just wondering what it's being protected from in this case.
 
I'm just wondering what it's being protected from in this case
I'm thinking from your cable provider / ISP. Based on some of the antics they get up to with DNS, wouldn't be a stretch for them to all up in your netflix stream.
 
I'm thinking from your cable provider / ISP. Based on some of the antics they get up to with DNS, wouldn't be a stretch for them to all up in your netflix stream.

And they would do that because...? I don't see how knowing what you watch on Netflix makes them any money.

I was thinking maybe the advertising industry would want to know what people watch... on a channel that has no ads... and then it didn't make any sense.
 
And they would do that because...? I don't see how knowing what you watch on Netflix makes them any money

Could it help them identity who's streaming, allowing them to slow down that traffic? I'm assuming if they did that, most people would blame Netflix since they would still be able browse other sites or content just fine.
 
And they would do that because...? I don't see how knowing what you watch on Netflix makes them any money.

I was thinking maybe the advertising industry would want to know what people watch... on a channel that has no ads... and then it didn't make any sense.
ISPs have been experimenting or playing around with throttling specific content. If they didn't know what is in the packets you get, they couldn't do it anymore. Where i live there were precedents of some isps throttling torrent / streaming video traffic, becuse they deemed them and their users "undesirable" .
 
I read the Netflix tech blog linked to in the OP, which refers to this report (.pdf file). In the third paragraph of the introduction, Netflix states "Evolving market forces as well as the changing landscape of the internet [3] have caused us to re-evaluate our view on TLS." Footnote 3 turns out to be:

[3] E Snowden, “Edward Snowden: The ten biggest revelations”, Edward Snowden: The 10 Most Important Revelations From His Leaks, August 2014

So, Netflix is protecting us against the NSA. Okay!
 
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