Like many internet services, Plex accounts have usernames that are unique across all users. That username is visible to any friends you have on Plex and visible to the other managed accounts in your Plex home.
For the last few years, anyone who signed up for a new Plex account had their username set to their email address. Most users never changed it. This meant their email address was visible to all of their friends on Plex.
This does NOT mean that email addresses and usernames are visible to the general public. It’s visible specifically to the people you’ve accepted as friends.
As @BigWheel pointed out, the current ‘Add Friend’ screens allow you to type in a username and email address and will confirm when it exactly matches a Plex username. Other than showing the avatar and confirming that account exists so you can send a friend request, it does not reveal any other information about that user. In order to facilitate the concept of Plex friends at all, we need to be able to allow people to find others.
The recent work to set a username for these accounts without one was done for two reasons:
- We felt that it was better to not have a person’s email address as a username that’s visible to other users. Most services that allow users to log in with an email address today don’t show it to others.
- Long term we’d like to make the process of friending other Plex users easier. Rather than requiring you to know the exact username of another person, we’d like to offer the ability to search for another user and get a list of possible matches. We can’t do that if those search results contain email addresses.
Considering some of the feedback on this thread, it sounds like we should consider an account level setting that prevents you from ever being listed in that future account search feature before it ships. That way you can control whether or not your account is discoverable by others.
