Over 45,000 Canadians Are Asking Netflix’s CEO to Stop Blocking VPNs

A few months after Netflix stopped Canadians from being able to access its U.S. content through the use of VPN services, we the people are fighting back.

Consumer activist group OpenMedia has penned an open letter including petition to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, asking him to end his company’s crackdown on users who use VPNs.

“We need easy, accessible, and effective tools to protect our privacy online while still enjoying the Internet we love – and VPNs do just that. We shouldn’t have to choose between Netflix and privacy,” reads the letter.

It’s not about being able to watch American Netflix in Canada, either – “the primary reason that 2 of 3 VPN users utilize a VPN service is not for accessing Netflix content,” writes OpenMedia. Rather, the group is worried that Netlfix’s policy means VPN users can no longer access even domestic Netflix content without exposing themselves online.

It’s a very reasonable argument – VPNs are an essential tool for protecting your data from malicious criminal activities, government surveillance and censorship, or when connecting to weakly-secured Wi-Fi “in a post-Snowden world,” as the letter says.

Hastings had recently said that people upset by the crackdown are “a very small but quite vocal minority,” dismissing their concerns as “really inconsequential.”

Perhaps he had underestimated the size of Netflix’s privacy-conscious subscribers: nearly 45,000 people have signed the petition asking Hastings to not block pro-privacy VPN technology.

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