So you have no access logs on Discover? How do you run a public facing web service with authenticated users without logging anything?
when someone manually marks as watched we don’t track where they did that.
So the Discover service’s web server does not log any user activity? Based on the privacy policy, that does not make any sense.
For example:
" we may collect information about the devices that are used to access our Services, such as the IP address of the device, the operating system and version of the device, the browser that you use to access a Plex web page, and the versions of the Plex technologies being used. We may also collect location information about the devices that access our Services."
and
“For example, for Third-Party Content, we use information about your interactions with the Services to track the watch state of media items that have been linked to the Services on devices that have been linked to the Services”
So device information is actually not being collected anywhere and is never being linked to any Services? Plex has no idea what any activity of its users are up to? Why is this in the policy then?
If anything like this is being collected then it is trivial to see if a user ever accessed Discover.
Yes we track somethings but we intentionally do not track the activity of where you manually mark as watched/unwatched.
Third party things would be things like us needing to tell Crackle that you actually streamed something though us that Crackle provided so they can get paid for their ad revenue, but if you only marked that thing as watched then it is just a generic Title ID that you marked and we won’t know through what means you did that.
Ok thanks - so this does present exactly the problem I feared. Any user who has permissions to one media server and has not accessed the Discover system and uses this feature will leak that the media server in question has a certain media item on it.
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They could have gone to watch.plex.tv. added something to watchlist then marked the thing as watched in their watchlist never having enabled Discover or Movies & TV at all. We would not know where the marking happened.
So you do not track any activity on watch.plex.tv? This is just a process of elimination here. If the user doesn’t use any of those things and then uses this feature, it clearly came from the one media server.
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Based on what I’ve read, if I’ve been following correctly… since Plex doesn’t know where the activity came from, it likely doesn’t connect the dots that they do or don’t use a particular corner of the system.
The point is about capability - if they have enough information to figure it out with the data they have (which they do! they know if you’ve logged into watch for example), that’s the issue. That’s why I want to be able to disable it on a per-server basis.
It’s an account level setting rather than server level setting.
In saying that, if yours is the only account with access to your server then it’s kinda a mute point. Unless I’m missing something.
The scenario is as follows:
- Joe operates a server
- Sam has only been shared access to Joe’s server (and never accesses any other plex service like discover or watch etc)
- Sam activates this feature and watches a movie
Now it’s clear that Joe’s server has the movie.
Even if you don’t have discover enabled a friend (who you may not even be sharing with) could email/text whatever you a URL like below which will open the discover universal details page from which point you could have marked it for all we know. There are just a bunch of places could happen.
Again, that means you have no logs of any Discover web activity, which makes no sense. In this scenario, the user never uses any of those services.
Nope, that’s not true. See below from support document…
The sync event does not let us know whether you performed the action on a Plex Media Server library item, a Discover page, or through a Movies & Shows streaming title. Activity from any of those would look identical. So, there is no way to know whether something being “watched” occurred because you went and saw it at the theater and then marked it on the Discover page when you got home, you watched through a personal Plex Media Server library, or anything else.
You are missing the point here. An absence of logs of the user on all those other services means the user could only have done it from the shared server.
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Two questions:
-
How does Plex handle existing conflicts between servers? If one server currently has a movie watched, and another unwatched, how does Plex decide which is correct? Is there a “master server” in that scenario? (Or does Plex only make changes from this point forward, and not sync existing stuff?)
-
Is there a way to opt into the service, but to disable the functionality on a single server? I have a separate server that I probably would prefer not to be linked.
This all may be moot, since Sam was prompted when they logged into any of a few players and was given the option of enabling this feature. It is opt-in. If you do not opt-in, Plex will not track on an account-basis whether a particular movie GUID is marked as “played” or not, only Joe’s server itself does (and it does this only to show you the orange triangle in the movie’s corner).
This is precisely why I want Joe to be able to stop Sam from sharing activity done on Joe’s server with Plex, since Joe did NOT opt in.
I was told on the initial sync it only saves the most recent one.
- I don’t think that is possible
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Hmmm, I see your point. I thought you were concerned on Sam’s behalf, but now I see it is Joe (owner’s) behalf. I… suppose that that could possibly be a potential line of “evidence”, but it would require access to the logs of every single possible Plex service (watch.plex.tv, movies and shows on plex, discover, etc) to find out WHEN an account logged in. Lack of a login event for the web service could… maybe… rule out that as a source of the “played” status.
Seems a bit paranoic to me though. Since Plex can be configured to allow Sam to search for a movie title using search, or using the Discover feature, then at ANY time you can make the case that Sam simply used discover to mark it “played”.
And if you don’t trust Sam to opt out of such a feature, Joe maybe shouldn’t trust Sam with access to the media in the first place.
