I’ve been a Plexpass life member for decades now. And these emails will finish that. It is the embodiment of enshitification of a good product.
Who in their right mind thought it would be a good idea to store this data in Plex databases and do anything with it?. There is a reason we are selfhosting. And I get emails about what friends are watching on their servers and vice versa? Absolutely dumbfounded here. And that is toning it down.
This should career ending as far as I’m concerned. Plex used to be superior to for instance Jellyfin, but this is soooo much worse, I’ll take Jellyfin anyway.
As I said, I’ve been a member of PlexPass for decades. And I have NEVER ticked a box: yes please spy on my friends and let them know what I watch as well.
I’m really not sure what the end goal is. To think that at some point, the idea of ‘emailing usage reports’ resulted in agreement (or even applause) baffles me…
In the support document I linked above there is a section on privacy.
The pertinent part:
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.
I still don’t understand what you guys are hoping to achieve with this? “Hey possible new user (or plex pass) would you like to receive usage reports while sharing your content ?” How would that be useful/interesting in the first place ? If you curios you’d be able to see that in the plex manager.
Maybe do an OPT IN instead of a faulty OPT OUT? to see how the reaction is to this wonderful feature.
Those emails contain the media usage of your “Plex friends”, not that of yourself.
If you set your media history to “private”, it doesn’t affect the same setting in your friend’s accounts.
Keep in mind that “Plex friends” can now be separate from users with whom you share your media, from your personal PMS.
Before this new feature, all users with whom you shared your media were automatically your friends.
Existing shared users are still your Plex friends.
If you want, you can now remove them from your Plex friends list, but keep on sharing your media with them.
This makes sense for users who don’t share much of your taste in movies or shows, and/or with whom you are not likely to engage in an exchange of opinions about “that new movie”.
Just to make sure: opting IN to marketing emails is just the icing on the cake here. That’s a “bad thing” to do.
But I’m even more upset by the fact that Plex has this data AT ALL and chose to share what I watch with friends of mine. And what they watch with me!!!
That means; no other explanation possible, that at some point, that data is gathered and used for marketing emails. And that is just an extremely large, huge, incredible: NO. Not even something that would be “opt-in” or “opt-out”, it’s something Plex should simply NEVER do.
It was more so that all my email preferences got re-enabled without me doing it. Which imo should not have happened. As I had previously unsubscribed to all emails…
These mails only contain activity of Plex friends, who chose to keep their media usage not private.
“Private” is the default, btw.
So, if your Watch History is set to “private” (you can check that here https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/profile ), then your activity will never appear in such an email, and will never be shown to other Plex users, not even your Plex friends.
Those emails are custom-created for you. Their content is not shared with other Plex users or any other persons or companies.
The same applies to your friends. Encourage them to check this page while logged in with their own plex credentials and verify the settings.
As mentioned in my first response above, you might also consider trimming down your Plex friends list, while keeping to share your media with them.
I wonder how many people just had their week’s porn selections emailed to their Plex friends. I just got an email about a friend’s watching habits which he definitely didn’t want to share. He insists he’s never opted in to any data sharing, but… it went out anyway.
Again, I’m a decades old Plex pass user, never had these emails, never changed such settings. This is recent and a definite change from before. Besides, why have a choice “private or not” just keep it private and don’t create options or features that need things to “not be private”
I’m sick of all these platforms that “lure me in” and then betray me afterwards. I thought Plex was the pleasant exception.
This feature needs to go away immediately. A server owner should be able to COMPLETELY disable sharing of any media watched on that server. I’m absolutely disgusted by plex.
