Disney-

Drawing by Wally Wood

A year ago I began subscribing to Disney+ to watch Peter Jackson’s Thanksgiving premier of The Beatles: Get Back. Lately I’ve been watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars in chronological story order. I was expecting that Disney+ would price itself closer to HBO Max after they had built up a subscriber base, so this notification wasn’t a surprise.

We wanted to let you know of an upcoming price change to your Disney+ subscription. Effective on December 13, 2022, your subscription will now be called the Disney+ Premium plan and will change in price to $10.99 per month. Your payment method on file will be charged unless you cancel your subscription before December 13, 2022.

We are committed to providing a variety of offerings and quality content to our subscribers. You now have the option to choose our new, lower-priced plan, Disney+ Basic (With Ads), or upgrade to one of our Disney Bundle plans.

Yeah, okay, so the price is going up a few bucks per month. But then, a week later, it was followed up by this message that is not okay with me.

Disney+ now requires additional information from the primary account holder, including your birthdate and what best describes your gender. To avoid any interruption to your streaming, please update your account with this information before December 8, 2022.

Note that once submitted, your birthdate cannot be changed without contacting the Help Center. Your gender can be changed at any time by navigating to your Profile Settings. If you’d prefer to keep your gender private, you may select “Prefer not to say.”

They’re threatening to interrupt service to paying customers if we don’t do as they say? Disney seems to have forgotten that customers are not employees.

If they want to know the primary account holder is over 18, that’s what they should be asking. Instead, they seem to be fishing for marketing data. I’m not going to play this game, and if I end up having to contact the help center I will lie about my birthdate, and tell them so.


Follow-up: I don’t know if “Seiko Eloise M” is an AI bot or an actual person. Via live chat she confirmed the requirement is for the primary account holder to be 18+, and she said it’s okay to lie about my age to provide that confirmation.

I completely understand your feedback about this. We care about your input and will be passing it along to the right teams here for further review.

No worries, Douglas you can lie on your birthdate as long as it is associated with 18 years old and older

Seiko Eloise M
6:27 PM

The birthdate I entered is May 25, 1977 — the release date of Star Wars.

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