Today I received an email from Plex stating, “We noticed you haven’t been playing a lot of media lately. No worries, we just wanted to remind you how easy it is to enjoy your content from a ton of devices.”
This is disconcerting for a number of reasons
I run the PMS on an iMac in my home - not via the cloud - so why is Plex tracking my play usage? (beyond the fact that the statement - i haven’t been playing a lot lately - is incorrect given we don’t have cable and solely use Plex for entertainment purposes)
Why does Plex believe that sending such an email will not raise red flags?
Did anyone else get this email? Am I overreacting here?
I got this same email, and no I don’t think you are overreacting. I’d like a firm answer from Plex on what data they are tracking (without my knowledge or permission) and why they are doing so.
Ditto. I’m also willing to entertain a discussion of which alternatives make the most sense for someone happy with Plex, but for the monitoring issues.
@Atonnis said:
There’s a setting that says ‘Send anonymous usage data to Plex’. And, that option is, and always has been, TURNED OFF! And yet, I also got this e-mail. ???
(1) It is not true.
(2) I never consented to monitoring my viewing habits on my home servers, either locally or remotely.
If the email is accurate that they are monitoring our usage, they need to cut it out. If it’s not accurate, they need to apologize and re-write their advertising copy.
I use PLEX all day long - no cable - watch movies and TV shows back to back on multiple devices.
Whether or not this an invasion of my privacy is questionable since they obviously do not have the right info.
a) This isn’t true, I have been using PLEX a lot, so what happened to trigger this?
b) I find it totally unacceptable that the company know how often I use the software, considering that I specifically disabled the (obviously not at all) “anonymous” usage data.
Beyond that, which frankly makes me question my usage of PLEX at all, this is a huge ridiculous mistake on the part of their product marketers.
I guess this has something to do with the fact that you need to log on to plex to use many of the features. For example I just realized that I cannot startup Plex Media server on my Synology NAS without logging into Plex. It’s been a slow creep towards this over the past year or so and it’s very disheartening.
I have no problems paying for a service, in fact I’m lifetime Plex Pass member because I wanted to support this endeavor. I think we are owed an explanation otherwise I will unfortunately have to migrate away from Plex, which would indeed be a pity.
Just an FYI … I am just providing the following information to help with understanding I am not giving an official response for Plex -
The Privacy/legal page and the TOS links above are very clear and detailed on what Plex is tracking and the privacy-policy that goes along with it.
The “send anonymous…” option does not turn this off. This option is used for information about media matching and other basic usage to help improve the experience using Plex. This data is different than what is collected in as described in the above links.
Also, when you are running your own media server (not using Plex cloud) your client still connects to the plex.tv server to verify that the client/username being used is authorized. Once this is completed it then passes off the connection to your own server which handles the streaming of the media directly to the client you are using. (The plex.tv/web app simply houses the modules for the client but is run locally once you have loaded them). What Plex can take from this is the version of the Plex server you are using and the client and version of the client software that you are using. If you have the “send anonymous …” data turned on they would also know what content was being streamed and all the information that goes along with it - which would be used in optimizing and better matching for other users … you get the idea.
