Recently a new dashboard was introduced. This dashboard is only visible when using the dashboard at plex.tv.
Does that mean, that the Plex company can show and aggregate my data including individual Movie titles and what users are watching what? Does the Plex company store those individual values or aggregated values on servers that are not mine?
I’m not very nervous when it comes to security stuff usually, but this goes way beyond what I would have expected.
You can follow the Plex Web thread to be notified when new releases are available. Scroll to the bottom of the thread, click on “Normal” and change it to “Watching.”
I did. And that’s why I’m wondering that the Plex company can show details of my metadata on their website (“app.plex.tv”). Here’s the relevant part of the Privacy Policy just in case you didn’t read it:
"[…] we do not collect or store metadata (information about the specific file, cover art, subtitles, running length, etc.) for Personal Content stored on your personal Plex Media Server […].
So let’s get serious folks: If the Plex company does not collect Metadata of my content, how come that they can show it on their website?
Just to add some clarity- the UI elements and framework is hosted on plex.tv. The actual content, be it movie titles, users, etc. is all pulled from your personal server. None of your data, media, or statistics, is stored on plex’s servers. The web app hosted on plex.tv is a front-end for your server’s data. Watch statistics (and everything else) exists solely on your server.
The app.plex.tv is just a shell for your local PMS (or other attached Plex servers). The app.plex.tv shows data from your local PMS. That doesn’t mean, that Plex (the company) has access to it. The stats data is already in your local Plex SQLite3 database.
This is the correct answer. The web app hosted at app.plex.tv has always loaded assets (e.g. images, styles, javascript) from our servers. It then requests information about the media servers associated with your account so it can talk directly to your media servers. The data needed by the Dashboard isn’t passed through our servers. It goes straight from your media servers to the web app, and it is not stored by the web app. You can see this for yourself in your browser’s inspector.
The web app hosted at app.plex.tv is the same as the one that ships with Plex Media Server. However, it is much easier to deploy to app.plex.tv, so that will always have the most recent version. We tend to give that app a little time out in the wild before updating the one that comes with Plex Media Server. If there is an issue, we can quickly push out a fix without disrupting people’s media servers.
