Twice now, I’ve had YouTube recommend me videos related to the show I’ve been currently streaming on my plex server, without ever having looked the show up on anything Google owned. This time it was a clip of the exact episode I was watching.
To give an idea of what my setup is like, I have my media on an NAS, Plex Media Server running on my windows 7 desktop, and am streaming the video with the Plex app on my Roku 4. I realize once was probably a coincidence, but twice, and this time being the exact episode of a 14 season show, seems less likely to me to be a coincidence.
So I’m wondering if you folks share any information with Google, or if maybe Roku might be sharing it somehow. To be clear, I’m not asking in an accusatory or angry way, I’m just genuinely curious why I would be getting these uncanny YouTube recommendations. Thanks for your time and help!
I want to know exactly how all our personal information is being used…
Plex has already been breached once that they publicly admitted to so I would be keen to know exactly what is being logged and what personal inforamation is being passed through third party servers…
"Metadata and Statistics. While Plex does not generally collect or keep any information that can identify files in your media library, Plex may store information about media items that you choose to use with certain Plex features."
"We may collect location information about the devices that access our Services. Any location information collected will not identify the location of a device with any more specificity than the city in which the device is located."
There are a number of concerning clauses in there, but in my case I think, “As another example, we may track your consumption of media items to provide recommendations for other content you may enjoy.” or “Except as expressly stated in this Privacy Policy, we will not share your information with any third parties, except in the following limited situations: IV. If your information is a part of a set of non-private, aggregated, or otherwise non-personal information, such as aggregated usage statistics.” , are the most likely things to have been somehow obtained by Google.
Additionally, I can’t help but find this kind of disturbing "Deleting your account. You may delete your account by selecting the option to delete your account in the “Account Settings” page. We will delete your information within a reasonable amount of time after receiving the request except that we may retain archived copies of your information as required by law or for legitimate business purposes. What constitutes “legitimate business purposes”? Seems any data can be kept for as long as they want with such a vague terminology.
I, too, would like a detailed explanation as to exactly what information of mine is being harvested and how it might be getting to Google, because this has got me quite concerned. YouTube has recommended me these things without my volunteering such information to Google. The only places, that I can think of, Google would have obtained such information are either Plex itself or Roku (which would have had to get such information from Plex as well).
Am I in the right place to be asking these questions? Where is best to get an official response? I didn’t seem to find a support email, the forums is where I was sent by the support page.
@jseckler said:
So I’m wondering if you folks share any information with Google, or if maybe Roku might be sharing it somehow.
We do not share view history with Google or Roku or any other third party. View state/history of your own media is kept local to your server, so we couldn’t share it even if we wanted to.
(We of course do share aggregate data around usage with certain providers because it’s how they bill us, e.g. “we have 300,000 EPG users this month”, but this isn’t personally identifiable stuff.)
Let me know if you have any other specific questions. I’m not a lawyer so I didn’t personally write the privacy policy, but I know how the data is actually used
Hahaha! I think Elan is actually Elon Musk, great resemblance. In a couple of years we’re going to be able to use Plex to get to Mars! :)) \m/ :)) But no offense really…
I’ve had a similar experience (NOT Plex) where I couldn’t correlate some very very very specific targeted ads for products. Consider your credit card. Have you made any transactions on the material similar to the Youtube recommendations? I realized in my case that it wasn’t browsing or any technical activity at all, it was my credit card where Google was getting that customer data. They were able to correlate the card to device with other transactions that were stored in local cookies and had a info sharing agreement of some kind. Quite odious.
@latweek said:
I’ve had a similar experience (NOT Plex) where I couldn’t correlate some very very very specific targeted ads for products. Consider your credit card. Have you made any transactions on the material similar to the Youtube recommendations? I realized in my case that it wasn’t browsing or any technical activity at all, it was my credit card where Google was getting that customer data. They were able to correlate the card to device with other transactions that were stored in local cookies and had a info sharing agreement of some kind. Quite odious.
Thanks for the heads up, and I’ll keep that in mind, but in this case, that’d be impossible as these were shows I’ve had in my media library for close to a decade.
I’d still really like to know how I got these recommendations, is it possible that I accidentally activated speech to text on my android phone, it listened and just heard whatever I was watching and somehow that got into the system? Maybe since YouTube recommendations are made by a neural net, it’s evolving and is now omniscient haha.
