If the business puts an IP range in its firewall and knows that that IP range contains the addresses of servers belonging to identifiable individuals that are its customers and that those individuals will have their servers thereby blocked from using a service that they’ve paid for then, no, that isn’t accurately described as “having absolutely nothing [to do] with individuals” and, yes, it is a matter of processing personal data in violation of GDPR unless the purpose and the legal basis have been explicitly stated in a privacy notice.
What you call citing “bits of directive and/or guidance [I’ve] read online” is what GDPR is and was stuff I had to learn about as part of my training. As such, it’s directly relevant to the case at hand, unlike your content-free musings.
As I said, good luck with your complaint. I look forward to hearing about how you and your local Data Protection authority have put Plex in their place and saved us from their nefarious evils.
(or, more likely, just notice at some point in the future that they’ve made some minor changes to their privacy policy which still won’t contain anything about the non-existent automated processing of personal data that they’re not doing.)
So you’ve mentioned. Which I why I’m looking forward to the successful outcome of your complaint to the Data Protection authorities so we can find out about all the evils that Plex have been up to with our personal data and how it’s now been stopped. I especially look forward to hearing about how they were in breach for emailing their customers to let them know about an impact to their service.
I heard from the almighty himself that the resellers on hetzcrap already proxied their communication to the Plex backend and are ready to continue business as usual.
I heard it’s plug and play too if anything else gets blocked. Instantaneous remedy.
I sympathize with people who are under the gun here and agree it is heavy-handed.
I am sure if it was practical for Plex to use a scalpel instead of a nuke, they would have done so. But they are not a big company and this kind of issue would take a lot of staff effort to handle gracefully.
Even if Plex did try to accommodate legit users in data centers, the solution might not be great. To boot the pirate servers and allow your home movie server to run, Plex would have to look more closely at your server’s activity. How many users do you have? What is their geographical distribution? How often do they come and go? Or, maybe they have to ask you to provide some more information about your identity. Or ask that of your users. That would cause a different kind of freakout.
I don’t think there is any way for Plex to tackle the pirate server problem without causing some other problems. It’s a real mess.
So here we are, those of us caught in the crossfire lose access to our servers, while those breaking the ToS see absolutely no impact from the action taken by Plex. This is what was going to happen all along and proves that Plex was completely ignorant in it’s approach to resolving the ToS violation and simply wanted to put on a show for the copyright holders so they’d lease them some more content for a little bit longer.
They can write some scripts to identify accounts that share a lot to a lot of people, or that have watch-hours and distinct viewers over a certain threshold, or something.
What they’ve done is not tackling the piracy problem. At all. I suggested earlier that the pirates will have already moved elsewhere, but @sixxnet also commented it’s possible to proxy just the Plex authentication bit. They will have done all that already. There are ways to try and tackle the problem, this is most positively NOT one of them.
You cut off my quote. I said “I don’t think there is any way for Plex to tackle the pirate server problem without causing some other problems.”
Sure, they can analyze usage to find pirate servers but there will be bycatch that way too. They may have already looked at that data and decided that the nuke was still the better option. They may be trying to stave off a lawsuit. We will never know.
I’ve outlined what they are likely in breach of and why. And, once again, you’ve provided a tendentious (false, actually) description of what that alleged breach consists in.
And your smugness about what you’re so certain is going to happen is really misplaced.
I wonder if proxying alone does the job or if a VPN is needed. Someone here (I think) said they were proxying through Cloudflare and still got the infamous email.
Not “in my opinion”: I am not alleging and have never alleged that the breach consists in “emailing their customers to let them know about an impact to their service.” So that claim is objectively false, not a matter of opinion.
You’re not proxying the communication to and from the clients. That’s not what I’m talking about here. You would need to proxy only the communication from your Plex server to the Plex backend. The client communication can stay the same.
Yeah, I know that. But are we sure that PMS itself doesn’t send along information about the server it’s running on?
So, theoretically, I could rent a cheap server somewhere else (wouldn’t even have to have a lot of bandwidth) just to proxy/reverse proxy the communications to the Plex backend (anything going to *.plex.tv?) and that would do the job.
If it’s that easy, I can’t imagine what this little farce was meant to achieve other than pissing a lot of people off.
It does if you have remote access turned on but I wouldn’t set it up like that. I would use “Custom server access URL” feature in the Plex network settings and use a domain not IP and then leave remote access turned off inside Plex.
No, it’s your opinion that what I said about their (likely) use of personal data (i.e. emailing customers to let them know about the service impact) is a ‘tendentious (false, actually) description of what that alleged breach consists in’. Or to put it another way (which I suppose is actually the same way), it’s your opinion that my view of what has (probably) taken place is false.
