How do we request Plex to delete our watch history?

General Discussions
22

They do. It’s in the privacy policy that they collect certain playback data.

23

Deactivating syncing data from server does not remove what was already synced. That is what the OP in this topic is asking how to remove. Once it is there we don’t know that is was from a server or you just decided to marker things as watched that you saw else where.

1 Like
24

I call bullshit on this, how would you else be able to send out an email of what someone else has been viewing WITHOUT you knowing where the data originated from?

25

Because you can have a number of different actions which trigger a change in watch state. You don’t need to know which specific action caused the change, only that the change occurred.

1 Like
26

Did I request an answer from a payed plex user, no. Thx.

I only hear excuses and no action. I only see how this platform deteriorates and how Plex have no understanding or interest in what the community wants.

27

details are here on what is saved https://support.plex.tv/articles/sync-watch-state-and-ratings/

28

Great get to work @BigWheel ! You guys created this mess so your job to fix it.

Get cracking

3 Likes
29

I’m not a developer but those who are cracking on various things. I have no ETA

30

My biggest concern is how the data collected with the Sync Watch State feature changed with this update. When it was first rolled out, the friend’s feature didn’t exist, and to the best of my knowledge, my watch status wasn’t posted on a publicly viewable website for others to see; it was only for my own use. I didn’t want this information to be shared with anyone else, and it goes against the spirit of the original feature.

2 Likes
31

It still isn’t. At most (and assuming you either didn’t change the privacy settings on the onboarding screens to ‘private’ or haven’t changed them since) your watch history would be accessible to a small group of people.

For most users who are sharing someone else’s server then it will have been available to only the server admin (who is going to have most, if not all, of that information anyway) as they are probably unlikely to have other plex ‘friends’. If you’re a server admin then it will be people you shared the server with. So, in the first scenario I cant see how it’s really an issue. I agree the second scenario isn’t ideal if you hadn’t intended for the privacy setting to be changed to ‘friends’, but it can at least be resolved by changing the privacy settings.

1 Like
32

Yes, in certain scenarios, your data may not have been leaked to other people, but if someone set it to friends which is the automatic selection, or misunderstood the feature and selected friends of friends, then it becomes a much bigger issue. The biggest point here is that this feature was never before advertised as a way to share your watch status with friends, and now it was suddenly used for that purpose with no way to go back and remove that data after the feature’s functionality was altered.

1 Like
33

If someone selected ‘Friends of friends’ then maybe it’s a much bigger issue, but if someone did take the time to see what the privacy options were do we really think they are likely to have selected that option if they didn’t want to share any information?

You can remove the data entirely, it just is unfortunately long winded at the moment. But changing your watch history privacy setting to ‘private’ will remove the data from anything your ‘friends’ could see in one easy go.

34

Yes, but the data will remain there just waiting for Plex to change another setting or have some bug where the data gets scraped… It’s a risk I don’t want to take and to avoid that risk, I’d like that data deleted. I have 5,000 items synced and I sure as hell am not going to go and delete them one by one.

35

I am not sure you can remove it all.

I have deleted all my watch history, but the counters remain. So I have no idea what actual information is being stored that those counters are based on.

36

I apologize for being wrong about this. When you remove an activity individually it is only removing that activity in the watch history hub, rating hub and activity feeds so it cannot be viewable by those given access to view in privacy settings. The individual watch state of items is still there which is what the counts on upper right are.

Was told we are building a way to remove all data without having to delete account but I do not have a ETA

2 Likes
37

I’ve found I was able to remove this by finding the relevant item in a watchlist (adding it if necessary) and marking it unwatched. Was important to do it on the watchlist item and not the local media.

38

yeah it you have syncing disabled that would be a way do that. but if you removed things from watchlist would be hard to figure out what everything is in those counts if you do not have on server as well

39

Yep, fortunately I only had a couple of items that I must’ve added when watchlists were originally added and I was messing around with it.

40

Thanks for confirming this is being worked on.

41

Thanks,

While that does seem to work, I have large numbers in there, so not really feasible to work out what they all are/were. Alot were probably watched on a older server that is gone, so cannot check the old dashboard to see what was watched.

For now I will just have to put up with the counters until we get the option to remove the data.