I just became aware of this today and am extremely dissatisfied and disgusted. Was this not discussed internally before rolling it out? It’s very obvious that the community does NOT want this and I struggle to understand how it got pushed through without objection from within. I’m sure you guys have some very talented and smart individuals who saw the flaw in having this feature be opt out instead of opt in. Please fix this and learn from the mistake.
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Plex, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f9BTBdv1NM
You REALLY need to respond.
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did anyone in legal in europe sign off on this opt-out bullshit?
the popups on tvs to agree to this never said emails would be sent.
emails cant be deleted when a user opts out at a later date. those emails still have history in them.
this is an actual gdpr violation as the user does not have control to make that history get deleted that was sent to third partys (emails)
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Absolutely crazy that the feature wasn’t opt-in. Disappointing.
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Just checked my settings, and it’s “friends”. This is ridiculous.
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I set up a new account to test some things. By default all the checkboxes in the email preferences were set to on, including the weekly summary.
What the GDPR does is clarify the terms of consent, requiring organizations to ask for an affirmative opt-in to be able to send communications.
I see no such affirmative opt-in before being opted in to a whole heap of emails when signing up for an account.
(of course, If you dig down into the privacy policy, you can find info about opting out)
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I had every single e-mail opted in, yet, I was never asked if I wanted to share my activity with people online. Out of nothing I received my brother’s activity, I went nuts! Like, what the F!? What’s going on!? Why in the name of God someone thought it was a good idea!? Why was I opted-in in this BS feature!? I don’t want to share nothing! “oh, people have private servers in their home 'cos they value privacy, let’s share all they’re watching with other people”. Yes, great idea!
I can understand you collecting some data to try and make my experience better, suggesting stuff to watch, that alone is already too much, but I can make that tradeoff, but sending people my activity!? Where did I signed for that? You only have to collect titles I watched, nothing else. How do I regret (literally) buying into this thing. Jesus!
BTW, how do I opt-out of this thing? Can’t find anything in my account.
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Did you find where!? I can’t find the option to opt-out of this BS!
WHAT A JOKE!!! Am I in control, really!? Really!?
- Finally found where to change. Go into your Profile page (https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/profile) and click this small icon that appears right next “My Watch History” and change what you want.
The post after this one has a better link and detailed information on how to actually get rid of everything social in this crap.
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Here → Weekly review emails data leak - #151 by OttoKerner
The eMail notification is point 7 of this list.
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I hope that with all this nonsense, people actually disable the syncing of “Watched” data and Ratings from their personal servers to their accounts, so Plex can collect even less data and this whole BS in attempting to make Plex a Social Media Platform end up as a shot in the foot for them. What a shame. Seriously, What the F where they thinking!? How can someone think this was a good idea!? This is insane!!!
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This is just vile. There is no defense for this.
I can’t believe this is a thing. It seems like a strange Black Mirror episode …
I feel like I must have misunderstood something somewhere. Just s there’s no confusion:
If you are contacting my friends and family about my watching habits or anything to do with my library you are doing a bad thing that hurts me.
I can’t believe this is a thing…
No, having this be opt out does not make it any better.
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I would like to keep this thread alive but at the same time in a civil tone.
200+ posts at the time of writing means that it’s not a trivial issue and it affects many users in a way that none of us had expected from Plex. Had it been Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook or any other social media, well… you probably asked for it. But not Plex, which for the most of us is (was?) a beloved media server which helps you organize and watch your own media.
What is very interesting right now is: Is there any response from Plex Inc.? Any acknowledgment of the enormity of this issue regarding privacy? I know Plex doesn’t share roadmaps or ETAs but I remember they were fast responding to the latest accounts hack and informing users of the steps needed to secure your account.
I don’t want to tag Ninjas, Team Members or Developers. I guess some of them are following this thread and at the same time, avoiding it. Nevertheless, I would like to express my thanks to @OttoKerner (tagging allowed) for bravely showing up and doing remarkable work with the 7 bullet points you need to follow to disable this monstrosity.
And those famous 7 bullet points - which will go down in the history of shame and deserve a Wikipedia page - bring us to the crux of the matter. The issue is not so much Plex being interested in this sharing nonsense. They can do whatever they think reasonable or, in this case, probably profitable from a business perspective. The real problem is the implementation.
No previous information, no opt-in choice and alas, no possibility of disabling this stupidity centrally by just clicking on a single button.
If I had any say in this, the person who came with this idea would be laughed out of the office but the project leader in charge of the implementation would be summarily fired. For incompetent.
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Your understanding is wrong. You introduced a new setting and you put as default something that SHARES data and you NEVER asked me about it. I am a resident of the EU and you can’t share my data without letting me know first and allowing me to opt OUT. Your default action was to opt IN, which is clearly wrong. And you yourself posted an explanation with screenshots in which you PROVED your actions break the GDPR.
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Before I start, none of the below should be taken as me condoning Plex’s actions in relation to this. As with (I think) everyone in this post I think the introduction/handling of this ‘functionality’ has been sub-par at best.
Let’s not forget that only 2 of those 7 (points 3 and 4) relate to sharing of ‘watch’ data, and that if you disable syncing watch history (point 4) it pretty much renders point 3 irrelevant in most cases. The remaining 5 points all relate to information being provided to you.
That’s not entirely correct. Plex sent out an email in advance of this going live (I received it on 8 November) which detailed ‘Discover Together’ and linked to a blog post with further details. That blog also linked to support pages about profile privacy setting etc. I also distinctly recall seeing a splash screen when it went live asking me to confirm my privacy settings (albeit I will grant you that I believe I did have to set them back to ‘Private’ as it was defaulting to ‘Friends’), but there was no change to my option of syncing watch history (which was inactive and remained inactive, which renders the privacy options moot in real terms for me). That setting (syncing watch history) does also almost act as a central ‘disable’ button.
It is, however, disappointing that there has been a lack of any real response from Plex. It’s difficult to tell if they have taken any action, although on just creating a burner account I had a splash screen I couldn’t get past that made me select a privacy setting for sharing watch history (unfortunately it still defaults to ‘Friends’) and syncing watch history was inactive. I’m unsure if this has changed any from when Discover Together was first introduced.
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Plex user since 2010. Plexpass for forever.
You just killed this product for me. You store my self hosted viewing habits and then send those details to my friends. Yeah its nice theres an opt out, but auto opt in? Some email a few weeks ago (that no one would read, which did not have a nice subject saying “privacy choices to make” or whatever.
Learn to read a room, your userbase never wanted that. Im going to be investigating alternatives this week and once picked I wont be coming back to plex again. I suggest others do the same.
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It it just me or does the privacy policy actually say about playback data:
As described above, client playback data does not identify what content was played, does not identify what server the content was played from, does not identify the owner of the server that the content was played from, and is generalized
https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/privacy-preferences/#opd
So… even if im “opted in” your privacy policy states you wouldn’t store or share playback data. What gives?
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Neither I nor any of the users that access my server would ever have consented to having their watch history shared among each other. This is a gross invasion of privacy.
And to make it worse - ALL OF US have to change multiple options in different places across account and watchlist settings to turn it off??
Shame on you Plex!
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Well, now it’s even more complicated. Instead of just easily following the steps from 1 to 7, you have to jump thru hoops and take into account that some points invalidate others and in some cases you will not even find them because you have previously disabled something.
What a mess. There is simply no excuse for this implementation.
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Not really. Either set your watch history visibility to ‘Private’ (again that’s something Plex should’ve carried over if it was already set that way, rather than defaulting it to Friends in the splash screens) or turn off syncing watch history. You can do both if you want to be thorough, but either one should be sufficient.
The remaining options will probably already have been turned off by those of us who aren’t interested in things like discover. I know I certainly turned that (and online media sources) off a long time ago and this recent added functionality hasn’t changed any of that.
Unless those users have each other as friends then the only person getting their watch history is you. And that’s information you already have (and have been getting ever since you allowed them access to your server). I would suspect that in the vast majority of cases the only real new transfer of data would be ‘users’ finding out what the ‘admin’ has been watching. The reverse has been possible forever.
