After Plex’s latest intentional privacy leak, I disabled the “Sync Your Watch State and Ratings” setting. How do I have Plex delete this history from its servers?
There is no current way for a user to multi select and/or bulk delete activities. Afaik a way is planned but I do not have an ETA.
Currently you would need to remove each activity individually from your profile page or delete your account.
Are there instructions for deleting your account without impacting your server and users? Also, would that eliminate the Plex Pass tied to the account?
I have sync status disabled on my account but things still show up on my watch history.
(Do I need to do this in each device?) or What should I do to disable this across every device?
It will impact them. Library access is tied to the account not individual servers. Deleting the account will remove the access from all that has it. The new account would need to give access again. I’ve not ever done it so honestly not sure if when giving new access to the same server DB if it would re associate the same accounts in local DB history since presumably the folks you gave access to would have the same username/ID . But again I have never done this and not sure I would need to find out…
Ditto for server admin but i thhin here is still a generic local “admin” type info that would link with which ever account claimed the server as admin.
Afaik it would be removed with account.
The setting only affects syncing from your server (not our streaming content) and the existing history will not be removed if disabled.
Can you take a screen shot where is shows disabled. Looking at your account it shows as active.
Don’t use the local embedded web client (192.168.1.5), use https://app.plex.tv/desktop. Also restart your server after changing the setting to ensure your server picks up the account change.
Why not? It’s my server. Surely this is disabled at my server…
This setting hasn’t been changed forever and it’s reboot regularly.
Plus it also says inactive on app.plex. So if it doesn’t take effect from my server what does a reboot matter???
If I dare to toggle it, it will enact a one time sync as per the feature. And I don’t want any sync.
Sync is an account level setting not server side setting so was mentioning it in an attempt to help. Anyhow, it’s disabled as you report so will leave it there…
I am not an expert on it, but I believe that not being able to easily delete personal data without losing your paid product violates the GDPR.
“the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay…”
I am not an lawyer or an expert on GDPR either so won’t comment on that.
As long as you forward those concerns to experts on that field within your organization, everyone is fine with that. I am not an expert in too many fields
If not, then please advise everybody how to voice those requests instead of trying to communicate with you as their point of contact.
I know that this can be tiring, but legal resentments cannot be taken too serious in my opinion.
Thank you for not voicing non-expert but Plex-labeled opinions that may or may not raise additional eyebrows I can fully understand that. On the other hand, people would love to actually get somebody’s answer.
Thank you very much.
I understand you’re not a lawyer, but these concerns need to be raised with your legal department because at least part of this rollout is certainly a violation of international law, and Plex will be facing fines or even being barred from operating in the EU if they do not comply with GDPR regulations.
Yes right! Please give it to your law Department.
This whole Situation is an Nightmare. I mean Come on, it is a self hosted product, ofc we do not want plex to Track more then necessary!
I forward along everything folks tell me.
@lunamonkey I was told I was reading your account wrong and it is inactive. I’m trying to find out what is going on. Just wanted to confirm you don’t watch anything from our free streaming adnd if you watch or mark something from server as watched you can see it updating in profile Watch History or activity feeds ( I assume we not not talking about play history on dashboard, which is local to your server.)
As far as I’m aware I’ve had sync status inactive for years. Maybe you can check when i deactivated it.
Why does this list exist if I think that I’ve deactivated it? I don’t understand.
Seeing as I’ve watched dozens more things since the Simpson’s last week. It seems selective. This was local content.
And actually I did watch Fifth Gear TV this week on PlexTV. Which doesn’t seem to be listed here.
Im seeing the same thing here. Sync was OFF and my profile has thousands of watched items listed now. How can we be confident that Plex isn’t collecting this stuff at this point? I really hope my library titles are not being scraped by them either.
It seems to collect anonymous data each minute during playback. I can see the attempted calls to analytics / clients subdomain at Plex.tv
I was looking through one of my “Friends” that is sharing their watch history, and it has history going back to April 2021 - and none of the content shown is from my server.
I thought this was only recently introduced?
Very interesting… Ill have to get Wireshark out and do some looking myself.