We wanted to clarify a few things about how Discover Together works based on the conversations here in the forums and elsewhere.
Discover Together is Opt In
When someone opened Plex for the first time after Discover Together launched on November 1st, they saw the following screens (note: this only applies to people who were not in the Discover Together Beta. Anyone in the Beta saw these screens when they enrolled). These are the TV screens, but the content is identical on Mobile and Web. The last screen allows you to choose your desired privacy settings.
As noted on the page, everyone’s privacy settings are PRIVATE at the time this page is viewed. If you save the choice on that page without changing anything, your privacy settings will be changed to the values shown on the screen which allows your friends to view your activity. If someone closes the app without saving their choices they’ll see the screen the next time they open the app until they complete the step.
We collect interaction data that allows us to monitor the choices people make on that page. We know that many users have changed their privacy settings to something they feel comfortable with (including many people who chose a more permissive option for each setting). We’ve also investigated claims from some users who said they never saw this page. In every instance, each user that set these preferences clicked through this screen.
That said, based on the feedback here in the forums, this screen could be improved. We are reviewing this screen internally and will be making some changes to ensure this is more clear in a future release.
You can change your privacy settings at any time by editing your Profile.
Discover Together + Syncing Watch State and Ratings
Last year we added the ability to Sync your Watch State and Ratings with Plex. This enables a movie or show to be correctly marked as watched wherever you see it on Plex (Plex Media Server, our free Movies & Shows catalog, or Discover).
This feature is disabled by default and users must opt in to start syncing. Anyone with access to a Personal Media Server when the feature launched last year would have seen the following page to sync their Watch State and Ratings. You can access the same page via Account Settings.
When this feature is enabled along with Discover Together, any titles that you mark as watched or rate will be visible on your Profile and the Activity Feed according to your Privacy Settings. This includes any titles that are watched on a personal server and synced using this feature.
Keep in mind that Plex does not collect information that discloses if a watched or rated title was viewed from personal libraries. We don’t know if you watched it from a personal media library or simply clicked the button to manually mark something as watched. Note that Plex does collect this information for our publicly available ad-supported, on-demand catalog.
Week In Review Emails
Last week we started a new weekly email series intended to highlight your friends’ activity on Plex. The information contained in these emails is accessible from within Plex’s Discover source in the Activity Feed based on your friends’ Privacy Settings.
This email was enabled by default and caught some of our users by surprise. Since these emails are intended to summarize activity from your friends and don’t contain Plex curated content, they are managed by our transactional email channel and NOT our Marketing email channel. If you’ve unsubscribed from our Marketing emails that setting should not have changed. This email is controlled by a different setting. You can change your subscription preferences for this email at any time on this page: https://www.plex.tv/email-preferences/ or via our Mobile app Notification Settings.
Based on this feedback we will add the email setting to the Privacy Settings page to allow our users to decide if they want to keep the weekly email or disable it when they’re making their privacy selections.
Adult Content / Porn
Some users are concerned that any adult content they watch will be shared with their friends. Discover Together relies on the current Plex metadata agents to match community activity to the appropriate title. Some of our metadata sources do include some adult films, but these have been flagged as adult in our metadata database.
Plex does not create Discover Together activities (or watch history entries) for any titles flagged as adult in our system. We also do not create activities or watch history entries for any personal media libraries using metadata agents other than the default Plex ones.
