HI,
if you search through the forum, you will find quite a few incidents showing that PLEX (similar to other US companies) defines privacy in a different way than eg in Western Europe. To give you a some examples:
(1) In 2017 Plex was considering getting more metadata and removing the opt-out for meta data collection, with the same reason which is always given (“improve the service”). And even after they pulled back (partially) on the ask, Plex basically said users are just overly paranoid (my words), and their good intentions were just misunderstood…
(2) There are reports from users going back until 2018 that Facebook servers were being pinged from the mobile app, even if you were not logging in via Facebook. Still Plex was adamant that no information was shared with Facebook and the users were wrong. Only in 2020, when inforrmation about Plex usage was showing up in the Facebook Graph, did Plex finally concede they were wrong all the time - and changed the app (which is a good thing). However Plex also (wrongly) claimed that deleting the data from FB Graph would stop the data sharing with FB. And Plex (wrongly) argued that no personal information was shared during those years.
(3) Even though the above caused some noise, still today trackers at least in the Android App which you cannot opt out of. The assumption is that the same trackers are in the IOs app - but is more diffiicult to analyse. In the Android App you have trackers for
- Facebook Login
- Facebook Places
- Facebook Share
- Google Admob
- Google Firebase Analytics.
If and what information is transmitted to FB/G depends on seetings in the SDK, this is not easy to analyse and can change with every update.
(4) Just look at the reply to your question - smoke and mirror. The pointer to ATSC 3.0 is completely irrlevant to your question. The only thing it says is that all the others are bad anyway, so dont worry about us.
In my view - it is glass half-full glass half-empty
Half-empty: Plex has shown over and over again that privacy is not on top of their priority list, Also their business model seems to develop in a direction where more and more external sources are being embedded - so sooner or later it will mean that more (meta-) data is collected and eventually shared.
Half-full: Plex has been on the market for more than 10 years, and to my knowledge there has never been any rumour let alone evidence that viewing history or content of your media library was being shared intentionally… Also they are being very transparent in the forum, and don’t shy away from discussions. What you see is what you get.
So in summary: Plex focus seems to be on functionality and user experience - not on privacy. From all what I have seen, at least for now there seems no intent from Plex to intentionally share this data. They are not the bad guys, so as average user you probably don’t need to worry. However if privacy is a priority for you, consider a more privacy focussed solution, starting with one which can work “locally” between your mobile app and your NAS without having to connect to (plex) servers…
Hope you find this useful.
P.S. You may see answers popping up below my message, like “there is no privacy in the Internet anyway”, that “using an Android phone is ,giving up privacy”, that sharing all this metadat is relevant for running the Plex.
IMHO these are all valid discussions to have, but separate ones, and they should not be mixed with the question you askes.
