Do You Want the Ability To Delete Your History?

A reader writes, "I want to erase my "instant watching activity"; How do I do that as I do not need, or want, a history of movies that I have watched?"

Do you want the ability to delete your streaming or DVD rental history?

Comments

[Chris]

I feel bad for the folks who say yes.

[ZarathustrA]

...me too.

[sarah]

so you delete your history and what happens a year from now when you pull up Dr Strangelove and think "gee i haven't seen this before". i can understand wanting to keep it private from friends. but delete? i'm not sure why you would.

[Jeff]

our brains forget stuff like this all the time. if you want netflix to work more like your memory, i can understand your wanting the delete history functionality.

[Netflix User]

He just doesn't want his girlfriend/wife knowing what kind of movies he's been watching.

[conedude13]

it would be helpful, because what if you are just testing a movie on watch instantly (WI) and you didn't watch the whole thing; you just clicked on the first WI movie you saw. then it would be helpful.

another feature that sort of makes complete sense to me would be watch instantly for sub-accounts. RIGHT?!?! :P

[SteveP]

I'd love to delete it. There are times when I start watching something and then realize it's just junk, I'd rather view my history as a history of things I watched, wanted to watch, and know I've already seen. I really don't want a bunch of crud in there that I watched fifteen minutes of.

[Steve]

"He just doesn't want his girlfriend/wife knowing what kind of movies he's been watching."

LOL... that's exactly what I was thinking. Or perhaps his parents? Otherwise, what difference does it make?

[Finngall]

Actually, I was hoping for something like this as well. My almost-ex-wife had a separate profile on my account. I want to delete the profile but I can't, and neither can Netflix--I called and checked. I deleted all of her ratings, but the rental history apparently Must Remain Until The End Of Time. Really annoying.

[mark]

no thank you. i like seeing what i rented years ago.

[NSA]

I like seeing what you rented years ago too.

[Ishtar]

It would seem logical to me that the Netflix rental/IW history is just populated straight from Netflix's records; if they made it possible to remove history/IW the only possible ways to do that would be if they made it possible for you to block a specific title from populating on the website (which wouldn't be too outrageously hard, but is a pretty poor use of labor when there are other things that need work), or to keep two seperate histories, which would be absolutely ridiculous and consume far too many resources.

Maybe, and here's a thought, people should man-up and admit that they like watch movies that have sex scenes in them... in bulk... late at night on a Friday... because your wife (and let's not kid ourselves, anyone with a girlfriend--not wife--who's looking at not-even-softcore movies on Netflix... they won't be keeping that girl long, let alone long enough that she's going to bother looking at his Netflix account to see what he's up to!) most certainly will see what you've been watching.

[Sean]

The problem with instant watch is that if I put something on and decide 3 mins in that I don't want to watch it that item still shows up in my history. Netflix needs a threshold to count something in your history, 25% of the run time maybe.

[marcus]

No.

[Isaac Church]

It would be nice to be able to delete things from the list you watched for five minutes before you realized it was garbage/stupid/boring. I wouldn't want to delete everything though, that would be a mistake I think.

[Ed]

I like the guy that just says "No".

[Zmagnum]

I would have to say yes, See my problem is that I have 4 other people using my instant stream capability via a Roku box and 3 xbox 360's in my home. The problem is that the instant queue's record populates the main accounts viewing record as well.

Now, while I've told them not to rate anything they have seen via streaming to negate screwing up my recommendations on the main profile, which they have not, I'm still seeing horror movies and genre's that I don't like recommended to me because of there viewing histories and I detest horror movies.

To be honest I wish that the Instant stream's queue and rating system would have a separate rating profile compared to my renting profile as I don't want it cross contaminated with ratings that are not mine.

[Andrew]

YES. There are many movies I want to watch via streaming, but don't want my family/friends to be able to see. I want to see "Sex Drive", but don't want people to know. This would be a great feature!

[Jason The Saj]

It'd be nice...

What also might be nice is to delete just a given file, or maybe even list and non-viewable to others.

[steb]

Instant watch on sub-accounts makes more sense to me, then you should be able to keep your stuff private.

That plus the threshold someone suggested (15+min) would work great.

[total monkey]

i would rather have adult titles in my account history then Rise: Blood Hunter. i feel great shame that i even watched it and am now forced to face it on my list FOREVER, haunting me. to be able to remove this blemish from my otherwise awesome history would be so ... well, it would restore my faith in the power of forgiveness.

[first]

it should be a must

[Nat]

If you hover over the Friends popup menu in the navigation bar at the top of most Netflix pages, there's a "Movie Privacy" option, which can hide from your friends any movie you've ever rented, watched, or queued. That seems plenty adequate to me.

http://www.netflix.com/SharedMovies

[Jason]

I guess whatever floats ones boat but I think erasing your IW and/or DVD history is the silliest thing I have ever heard. Ignoring the fact it is there is as good as deleting it unless you don't want the wife to know you secretly watched that breast documentary. LOL

[Walt D in LV]

In agreement with the majority of readers: No. No, thank you.

I would DEFINITELY love to have Instant Streaming available to sub-profiles, however. For all the reasons mentioned above, most specifically, let the movies they watch show up on THEIR profile.

Walt D in LV