Netflix's 'Prank Encounters' collects and erases my DNA every time I watch an episode.

So the Netflix show "Prank Encounters" starring Gaten Matarazzo from 'Stranger Things' is pretty strange. <br><br>The show's premise is that unsuspecting people are brought in for a job that they believe is a normal "temp position" and when you show up, you're immediately put through a series of strange pranks, which start out as something you'd find in a normal haunted house but as the night progresses they get crazier and crazier. <br><br>One episode, the crew tries to convince the unsuspecting person that the place where they're working is now under some kind of zombie apocalypse, and they even go so far as to hire a stuntman to leap off of a 5 story building and land on a giant airbag. <br><br>The show is pretty entertaining. But what I haven't seen anyone else talk about is that whenever you watch a new episode of 'Prank Encounters', it seems like Netflix always asks you to 'agree' to something before you can watch. <br><br>I'm used to seeing these before documentaries, but not a show like this. I never really paid attention as to what I was agreeing to, I just figured it was something mundane that I'd already agreed to before. <br><br>But the other night I noticed something. Every time I clicked 'agree' before watching a new episode of 'Prank Encounters', my browser would drop a cookie called "did-consent". But it wouldn't just drop a single instance of this cookie, it would drop about five, each one labeled with a number. <br><br>In other words, the first time you agree, it drops "did-consent-0", the second time, it drops "did-consent-1", then "did-consent-2" and so on. This led me to believe that Netflix was keeping some kind of tab or score of how many times you've agreed to this. Perhaps it was so Netflix could tell if you'd agreed before, and then parse if you saw some kind of updated consent notice, like they do on european users. <br><br>In other words, I thought that the first time you agreed they gave you one notice, the second time, you were shown an updated notice. So I started looking through past 'consent' agreements for 'Prank Encounters', but they all looked exactly the same. <br><br>That was strange. I decided to look back through my past 'consent' agreements to see if Netflix was keeping track of my consents for other shows. But for every other show, Netflix only gave you one "did-consent" cookie. <br><br>I didn't think about this again until a couple days later when I opened a new 'Prank Encounters' episode, and Netflix again asked me to agree before viewing. This time I decided to read the text of the 'consent' closely. <br><br>If you go back and read the text of the consent you'll see this line in the "Show Participants" section: <br><br>"Collection of Genetic Information. In connection with your participation in the Program, Producer may collect, use, and disclose your genetic information (including your DNA) as follows: We may collect a DNA sample from you, and we may use and disclose that sample and the results of any analysis of that sample as set forth above."<br><br>The full text of the consent notice can be found at the bottom of this post, but what this basically says is that Netflix can collect my DNA, and they can use this DNA for anything they want, as long as they don't sell it to a third party. <br><br>This absolutely blew my mind, I had never heard of Netflix doing anything like this before. <br><br>I decided to try and figure out if Netflix was actually collecting this DNA, so I hit the 'agreed' button and launched the show, and was immediately met with a "this show cannot be played, we don't have the necessary hardware to process this media" error message. I've never seen this message before, I use an apple laptop so I figured Netflix was trying to get me to stop using safari and switch to chrome. <br><br>In other words, Netflix was trying to get me into a browser that they 'trusted' more than safari. The reason why they might want this is that Safari doesn't let websites access your computer hardware (in this case my laptop's webcam) as much as Chrome does. So I tried opening Netflix in Google Chrome and immediately my laptop's webcam flickered on for a brief second as I got this message: <br><br>"We couldn't collect information from your device's camera and microphone. Try reloading the page."<br><br>So now Netflix was trying to access my webcam and they were having trouble doing so. I reloaded the page and tried to launch 'Prank Encounters' again, and Netflix immediately asked me to allow them to access my laptop's camera and microphone.