Amazon is finally sort of cracking down on Prime members who share their membership within a “household” that actually consists of their old roommate, their dad who lives four states away, and a co-worker. We all learned this when the e-commerce company quietly changed who is considered a “household” for the purpose of sharing your Prime benefits. Now Amazon has responded, and their main point is valid: most people weren’t using the feature in a licit manner in the first place.

The Prime-sharing program is now set up to allow for two adults and four children in a “household.” The two adults share access to their credit cards, which is why you should be very close to the person you choose to add to your account.

What an Amazon representative emphasized to CNET, though, is that the company isn’t actually enforcing the “household” thing, and the people you’ve already added to your account so they could have Prime shipping get to stay unless you manually remove them from here out. “We would give people plenty of notice before we did anything to those accounts,” an Amazon spokesperson assured CNET.

The subtle shift in this change is that instead of shipping Amazon packages for free to five different households (which is how many people used, or misused, the program) letting children have their own accounts emphasizes the streaming video and music available through Prime, and lets kids access media through their own login.

Amazon responds to furor over limits on Prime sharing [CNET]

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